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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

Video and audio encoding are becoming increasingly important in the world of personal computing. Home-editing of videos and sound recordings are among the popular applications as is just the standard archiving of DVD material. In the case of audio encoding, there is relatively little out there in terms of applications that are multithreaded, meaning that they would take advantage of multiple cores. Or if there are appications like that, they are not free and the generally short conversion times achieved with free download utilities do not provide enough anguish to actually purchase potentially faster, multithreaded applications.For this article we used two applications namely DVD-Shrink 3.2.and the latest version of MainConcept, namely H.264 Encoder. One thing to keep in mind here is that the utilization of eight cores. DVD Shrink 3.2 ran up to approximately 55% CPU utilization on eight cores and about 70% max in MainConcept

In the case of DVD-Shrink we compressed John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" from 4,464 MB to 3,323MB, a compression to 59.6% and Mainconcept encoded a Watermellon.mpg file to an [H.264] High, 1920 x 1080 pixel, 29.97 fps, 48,000Hz 16 bit MPG file.

DVD-Shrink

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better! The SkullTrail's encoding performance is so fast that I/O bottlenecks start to become a main factor. That is, encoding the same video and saving it to the same physical drive increased the encoding time by about 40 seconds compared to reading the source file from one drive and saving it to another physical drive.

MainConcept H.264

Encoding time in seconds: lower is better! Another suprise win...

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