[mythtv-users] Zotac IONITX Performance

Phill Wiggin alamar at gmail.com
Tue Sep 22 17:23:23 UTC 2009


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Paul Raison <paul at raison.org.uk> wrote:

> I have noticed several postings of people using these boards as frontends.
> I am considering using one of these boards and not sure if a single core
> version will be upto what I need or if I need the dual core version, Is
> anyone using the single core version to playback HD material? I know the GPU
> is doing most of the work, but still wonder if single core is enough whilst
> playing HD material.
>
> Any thoughts greatly appreciated!
>
> Regards
>
> Paul Raison
>

It took me a little while to find this, it was an email I sent to MarcT
off-list.

I bought the  ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Atom N330 dual-core. It's got 4Gig of RAM and
no hard-drive (I'm net-booting).

Here's the excerpt that includes some details.

At present, I'm still using the QT painter with .21, so YMMV.

I expect the 230 would be plenty of power.  Honestly, I'd have probably
gotten one of those instead, but they were out of stock (and Newegg was
predicting over a week before they might get back in stock).  I had a short
window to get it set up, so had to go with the more expensive model.

As far as numbers go, cat /proc/cpuinfo shows 4 'processors' (0-3).  When
playing Two and a Half Men HD, top shows:

top - 01:12:19 up  5:04,  1 user,  load average: 1.32, 1.08, 0.63
Tasks:  84 total,   1 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 31.7%us,  0.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 65.6%id,  0.1%wa,  0.4%hi,  1.4%si,
0.0%st
Mem:   3347068k total,   626036k used,  2721032k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   279740k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 5240 mythtv    20   0  765m 375m 127m S  121 11.5  87:47.70 mythfrontend
 5227 root      20   0  447m 116m 106m S   12  3.6   7:10.36 X
 5536 root      20   0 18952 1344 1008 R    0  0.0   0:00.39 top
    1 root      20   0  3812  612  520 S    0  0.0   0:00.72 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
<snip>

So, about 30% total usage over 4 'processors'. which should translate to
about 60% of a single processor 230. (This is software decoding, mind you.)

Once you throw VDPAU into the mix, I have no doubt a 230 will work fine.


Hope that gives a little more detail,

--PhillW
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