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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: The Ultimate Dream Machine Snoops and Filters Intels Snoop Filter Implementation SkullTrail Extreme D5400SX System Configurations Power Play 3D Rendering and Energy Efficiency Cinebench DVD-Shrink, MainConcept VirtualDub / DivX 6.8 3DMark'06 World In Conflict Crysis F.E.A.R. UnrealTournament3 The Final Analysis Give Us Some Feedback on this Article
Intel's SkullTrail Extreme Platform Playground of the Titans
(Author: Michael Schuette, February 10, 2008)

Audio Visual Content Creation and Media Encoding

Virtualdub / DivX 6.7 and SSE4 Instruction Set Improvements

Virtualdub 1.7.1 and higher with DivX 6.7 are optimized for SSE4 instructions to provide a significant performance gain over encoding in SSE2 mode. A 66 MB mpg file was converted to AVI format using the DivX 6.7 CODEC.

The CODEC settings were specified as Experimental SSE4 full search set to:

Disabled Enabled using SSE2 / Enabled using SSE4 (Yorkfield) with Enhanced multithreading enabled for each mode

All Intel CPU-related data shown were acquired using the ASUS P5K3 with DDR3 running at the highest memory frequency supported for any given CPU - depending on the host bus frequency specification of the processor. Since the memory runs in syncronous mode at its fastest setting, the 1333 MHz processors (333 MHz bus clock) were capable of taking advantage of the same memory frequency, whereas the 1067 MHz CPUs (266 MHz bus clock) were running DDR3 at 1067 MHz data rate and the P4 840 Extreme Edition accessed the memory at 800 MHz. In case of the Phenom, we used the default system configuration, that is AOD "Red" with the memory set to 1066 MHz. We also show a Phenom 9600 overclocked to 2.6GHz.

MPG to AVI conversion SSE4 disabled

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better! At the "lower quality" encoding without SSE4, the SkullTrail is not very competitive compared to other Intel CPUs.

SSE4 enabled using SSE2 or SSE4 (Yorkfield)

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better! With SSE4 instructions enabled, the SkullTrail system catches up but still does not match the Yorkfield systems.

A look at the performance monitor explains what is going on here, VirtualDub runs essentially on one core with the main load but because of the "additional processing" going on in the remaining 7 cores, there is a lot of I/O activity / snooping going on that slows down the system compared to anything running with fewer cores.

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