Initial Thoughts.....

The first full day with the new machine and things are looking good despite a shaky start.

One of the main reasons for buying the dual Quad-Core Processor (eight cores in total) was the fact that I do a lot of video encoding on the show. This is a hugh time sink and with having so many versions and resolutions it can be a bit of a pain and slows the production cycle right down.

One of the benefits of using Compressor (part of Final Cut Studio) is that it handles batch jobs really well so I can just hand over the Master file and it will happily sit there and crunch through, spitting out the final versions at the end. It's just so slow on my Dual G5.

Another benefit is that you can setup a "Virtual Cluster" on a single machine (or even using distributed machines) that splits the encoding task into multiple jobs and enables each processor to be fully utilised during the encoding process. Ideal for an 8 core machine.

So I struggled for a good part of the day today to get the Virtual Cluster to work, without success. Baring in mind today is a production day for the show, I could do without the hassle.

But after leaving it for a few hours I finally managed to get it to burst into life and did a very quick and dirty speed comparison between the new machine and the Dual G5. I took about 1GB of screencast files encoded using the Animation codec and re-encoded them using AIC. I used the same files on each machine and noted the time taken. I knew the results would be good but I was shocked at the difference:

Wow! 8 minutes on the 8 core and 32 minutes on the Dual G5

Spectacular!

Oh and I forgot to mention - another 8GB of RAM should be arriving soon.

Comments

[Niamh Kiernan]

Don,

it is good to see that you have your own European reality.

Interesting information on compressor speeds. I'm having a moment of envy over your mac reality.

Niamh

[Riskin]

The interesting thing about these results is that the G5 seems to be losing only due to the number of cores available. If it takes 2 cores 32 minutes, then it would take 1 core approximately 64 minutes. In truth it is probably less than that because multiprocessor speedup is never 100%, but we'll keep it simple. So 32 minutes x 2 cores = 64 minutes for the same job done on a single core.

Looking at the 8 core Mac Pro we'll do the same math. 8 minutes x 8 cores = 64 minutes for the same job done on a single core.

Clock for clock the G5 is certainly looking good compared to the higher clocked Xeon. I'm not arguing with the results nor am I suggesting that Apple should have stuck with PPC. But it is worth noting that the G5 CPU itself still packs quite a punch. It's too bad IBM couldn't squeeze four of them into a single chip. And no matter how the performance is achieved, you're definitely saving time with the new machine.