[mythtv-users] Intel Atom backend?

[Simon Hobson]

Christopher Sean Hilton <chris at vindaloo.com> wrote:

> Am I going to be happy with the Atom or disappointed?

Depends on your expectations.

I have an old model HP MicroServer as my backend. Two cores :
> vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
> cpu family	: 16
> model		: 6
> model name	: AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L Dual-Core Processor
> cpu MHz		: 1297.926


So not exactly blazing fast. It'll transcode without problems - but not in real-time. I get about 1/3 real-time transcoding so around 3 hours to transcode 1 hour of recording (variable depending on various factors). That's on UK Freeview (DVB-T) in standard def which varies from about 800MB/hour on the highly commercial channels up to 3GB/hour on BBC1 who seem to consistently use higher bit rates.

The only times I see issues due to it's low performance are when recordings start/stop and there's a burst of database activity. It's greatly reduced since I did some DB tuning and put the OS & DB on an SSD, but I get the occasional playback stutter at these times.
From memory, loaded with 2off 3TB drives and an SSD it takes a little over 40W.

Something with more "oomph" would be nice, but this is a small, quiet, low power box - and it was really cheap when I bought it as HP were having good cash-back deals to shift them. I see the current version (Intel Celeron IIRC) is also on cashback this month.