Lol, and then use one of the many awesome Video tools for your "normal OS".

Oh, whops. Linux. There are none.

You laugh, but most of the video encoding utilities that I can think of are really just wrappers that use libraries that are platform-independent. They work perfectly well on Linux (and OSX for that matter) with a simple GUI.

There's a lot of things you can make fun of Linux for, but this shouldn't be one of them. Start making fun of the insanity that is X11 configuration, I'll support you there

(02-01-2010 10:01 PM)Zeydlitz Wrote:  [quote]

Encoding -- 80%? It's little lame, because such usage is normal for workstation, not user laptop. If you want to gain speed at such case, drop out Windows, and use normal OS with normal many-CPU support. Normally, video encoding is not realtime task and could be thinking as low-priority process.

yea, my bro is into video production but he is never home which is why he wants a laptop. When I said used 80% of the time, Thats also while doing other stuff. I know he wants to use maya as well so I'm trying to help him not choose the wrong processor.

me myself know nothing about video encoding.

@ rama

I have never used linux before. I heard it was pretty good. But I dispise macs I know too much about windows to worry about a different op

@ Air

Thanks for your help. I think I know everything I need to. I find that all these processors are very annoying. Single, sinlge with ht, duo, duo with ht, quad, and quad with ht...... I say pick one and just improve it.

(another question about HT)

Hmm.. I could of swarn it was this thread. Someone mentioned "HT provides about a 15-30% speed increase." Maybe a different forum...

anyway, If that is true, could the core speeds be calculated by saying; A 3.2ghz single core with HT gives off a total of 4ghz if the HT gave off a 25% speed increase?

I think my math is right.

3.2ghz X 0.25 = 0.80ghz

so....

3.2ghz + 0.80ghz = 4ghz for a single core plus its HT.

(02-03-2010 08:47 PM)Xellon Wrote:  anyway, If that is true, could the core speeds be calculated by saying; A 3.2ghz single core with HT gives off a total of 4ghz if the HT gave off a 25% speed increase?

I think my math is right.

3.2ghz X 0.25 = 0.80ghz

so....

3.2ghz + 0.80ghz = 4ghz for a single core plus its HT.

Eh... for measuring performance from the user's perspective, it's better to think of HT as a separate "core" running at 15-30% speed (ie, 0.8ghz in your case). This is because HT is only a speedup if there are multiple threads of activity available to run in parallel, and if they aren't contending for the same pool of global resources (ram, storage, pci bus, etc).

So an i7 quad with HT is "8 threads": 4 threads running at 3.2ghz, and 4 threads running at 0.6-0.8ghz.

Windows7 has some more advanced HT scheduling logic, so there it might be more adept to look at it as more balanced ratio -- that is, a single core may run one thread at about 2.4ghz and the other at 1.6ghz. This would apply for balanced tasks like encoding. Gaming tasks, which are typically much less balanced, would automatically schedule a full 3.2ghz to the primary cores, and only use HT for secondary low-overhead threads.

This is from a user's perspective anyway. The real speed of the CPU is still just 3.2ghz. HT just allows it to push instructions through the CPU more efficiently, so that it's less likely to have various sub-parts of the CPU (execution units) in "idle" waiting for others to finish their work.

(02-03-2010 09:08 PM)Air Wrote:  

(02-03-2010 08:47 PM)Xellon Wrote:  anyway, If that is true, could the core speeds be calculated by saying; A 3.2ghz single core with HT gives off a total of 4ghz if the HT gave off a 25% speed increase?

I think my math is right.

3.2ghz X 0.25 = 0.80ghz

so....

3.2ghz + 0.80ghz = 4ghz for a single core plus its HT.

Eh... for measuring performance from the user's perspective, it's better to think of HT as a separate "core" running at 15-30% speed (ie, 0.8ghz in your case). This is because HT is only a speedup if there are multiple threads of activity available to run in parallel, and if they aren't contending for the same pool of global resources (ram, storage, pci bus, etc).

So an i7 quad with HT is "8 threads": 4 threads running at 3.2ghz, and 4 threads running at 0.6-0.8ghz.

Windows7 has some more advanced HT scheduling logic, so there it might be more adept to look at it as more balanced ratio -- that is, a single core may run one thread at about 2.4ghz and the other at 1.6ghz. This would apply for balanced tasks like encoding. Gaming tasks, which are typically much less balanced, would automatically schedule a full 3.2ghz to the primary cores, and only use HT for secondary low-overhead threads.

This is from a user's perspective anyway. The real speed of the CPU is still just 3.2ghz. HT just allows it to push instructions through the CPU more efficiently, so that it's less likely to have various sub-parts of the CPU (execution units) in "idle" waiting for others to finish their work.

I understand. Since Ht waits for the main core, its best to think of them at a separate thread at a lower clock speed (15-30% of the original clock speed)

I've also did some more research on the i7. I was only able to find the exact speeds of the 17-920xm from a test I saw while googling. Not sure what their test was but here were the results:

3.20ghz single core mode
3.06ghz dual core mode
2.26ghz quad core mode

The i7-820qm is 2.00ghz quad mode and the 17-720qm is 1.73ghz quad mode. So in the case of the 17-720qm, I could estimate with a 15-30% increase, it would be 1.73ghz on 4 threads and 0.259-0.50ghz on another 4 threads.

LOL, no where near as good as your 3.40ghz quad but not bad for a laptop. I don't even think the 17-920xm can match that and its about $1000 more O.o Guess thats the price for portability.

In the case of rendering, (assuming you can choose the number of threads you want to render with) I could use 5 threads on rendering and use the remaining 3 for multitasking. The rendering speed is slower then your quad but I think that i7 has an advantage over multitasking (render, while browsing, dling in a browser, dl manager, anti-virus, windows update, and watching a video on youtube).

Anyway, that is my thought process. I think I'm better off with a quad with HT.

EDIT: I think my brother is better off with a high seed quad. He doesn't want internet So maybe the m17x with two video cards since he is in video production. But In case that fries his laptop, maybe a 8 thread quad for him too.....(G73JH-A2)