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Re: Support for 8 cores?
Ok, I just did several tests test on my Q6600 @ 3.3GHz, 500GB WD Caviar.
Encoding speed and encoding time values were averaged for increased accuracy:
16-bit/48KHz Stereo Apple Lossless -> FLAC (c8), 1 core, 44x encoding speed. Since the file is 4:19 long, it took ~5.8864 seconds to encode it. Apple Lossless file was 18.0MB, FLAC was 19MB. 37MB (without taking caching into consideration) in 6 seconds (being generous), thats 6.2MB/s. Say my HDD can do 70MB/s. That means I'd have to be using 12 (11.29 rounded up) cores before my HDD becomes the bottleneck.
Now lets say I'm encoding to a network drive over Gigabit LAN where the network is the bottleneck (tops out @ a theoretical 125MB/s). If my HDD could keep up with the network, I'd have to use 40 cores before it becomes the bottleneck as you can calculate from the next sentence. But it can only do 70MB/s as I estimated before, we adjust the calculations. Since the output and input file sizes are roughly the same, we can cut the HDD read/write speed from 6.2MB/s to 3.1MB/s. That means 22 cores to max out the HDD. 22 cores * (125MB/s / 70MB/s) = 40 cores.
So unless I happen to have a 16+ core machine (lucky me, I do!), the HDDs won't become the bottleneck.
Same can probably apply to standard users too.
Ok, I just did several tests test on my Q6600 @ 3.3GHz, 500GB WD Caviar.
Encoding speed and encoding time values were averaged for increased accuracy:
16-bit/48KHz Stereo Apple Lossless -> FLAC (c8), 1 core, 44x encoding speed. Since the file is 4:19 long, it took ~5.8864 seconds to encode it. Apple Lossless file was 18.0MB, FLAC was 19MB. 37MB (without taking caching into consideration) in 6 seconds (being generous), thats 6.2MB/s. Say my HDD can do 70MB/s. That means I'd have to be using 12 (11.29 rounded up) cores before my HDD becomes the bottleneck.
Now lets say I'm encoding to a network drive over Gigabit LAN where the network is the bottleneck (tops out @ a theoretical 125MB/s). If my HDD could keep up with the network, I'd have to use 40 cores before it becomes the bottleneck as you can calculate from the next sentence. But it can only do 70MB/s as I estimated before, we adjust the calculations. Since the output and input file sizes are roughly the same, we can cut the HDD read/write speed from 6.2MB/s to 3.1MB/s. That means 22 cores to max out the HDD. 22 cores * (125MB/s / 70MB/s) = 40 cores.
So unless I happen to have a 16+ core machine (lucky me, I do!), the HDDs won't become the bottleneck.
Same can probably apply to standard users too.
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