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Posted by Smarty on 08/14/07 19:07
Thanks Paul and nappy. The comparison would best be known if a real
rendering test were performed on both boxes. The 6850 Conroe has been pretty
heavily tested using the "HDV-rendertest" being done on the Sony Vegas
support website, and measures around 117 seconds. The earlier 4 core MacPro
(which I previously owned) did about the same. The earlier MacPro with the
"Kentfield" Xeon CPU as well as the newer Clovertown 8 core both have the
same FSB speed as the Conroe, namely, 1333 MHz. Both chips also have 8 MB
in-board caches, so it would seem that the earlier MacPro 4 core and the
present Conroe machines (of which there are many) should measure about the
same. And indeed they do.
The unknown here is how well the 8 core newer MacPro distributes the Vegas
workload. I have yet to find anyone who has benchmarked it in this way,
although the Cinebench benchmarking shows about 50% additional speed when
going from 4 to 8 cores when comparing older to newer MacPro. It is not
clear whether Vegas can scale properly across cores and both Xeon sockets
given the bus and memory constraints. It is very apparent that performance
gains are excellent when the CPU and on-chip caches do the work, but the
memory latency and bandwidth do appear to be the bottleneck as Paul states.
Apple is the first to release 5365 Clovertown motherboards and has shipped
theirs for a few months now. This is indeed the 3.0 GHz version of the same
chip you found, Paul, the X5355. The chip has now (as of yesterday) been
released to other developers / manufacturers, so it will begin to gain some
traction and interest among the 6850 Core Duo Extreme and other high
performance users / buyers, including video people as well as serious gamers
and 3D modelers. The forthcoming "V8" Intel motherboard, shown as a
prototype earlier this year at CES, is rumored to be extremely similar to
the MacPro 8 core board. The "Big Axe" is another design recently
introduced.
These are very interesting times for video system designers who need lots of
kickass performance. The earlier Pentium 4 3.6 GHz chips of the last few
years are being leapfrogged by performance gains of 6X to 14X, assuming the
software has been written to exploit the parallelism.
Seems like crunching h.264, HDV, AVCD, and greater HD formats may not need
to be as slow as we have become accustomed to.
Smarty
"Paul" <nospam@needed.com> wrote in message news:f9sgk7$ecl$1@aioe.org...
> Smarty wrote:
>> Intel's offerings in high performance processor / motherboards has 2
>> somewhat comparably priced alternatives, the "Clovertown" 5365 which is
>> used
>> in 8 core Xeon 3.0 GHz versions in such products as the MacPro, and also
>> the
>> "Conroe" 6850 CoreDuo Extreme Quad Core which companies like HP, Dell,
>> and
>> others are / will be offering.
>>
>> I am wondering if there is any reason to prefer one versus the other
>> based
>> on PC performance, in particular for rendering in programs like Vegas 7.
>>
>> Any opinions would be much appreciated. Thanks,
>>
>> Smarty
>>
>
> Platforms that support the processors are different. The 5365 probably
> uses an FBDIMM memory based chipset. The 6850 might be compatible with
> desktop boards, and then maybe you could use DDR2 or DDR3, depending
> on chipset. Do both processors have the same FSB speed ?
>
> Memory bandwidth is limited by either the memory bus operating speed,
> or by the FSB operating speed. So one of those platforms is
> going to be better that way than the other.
>
> To a first order approximation, the performance is proportional to the
> core clock speed. Memory is a secondary effect, and sometimes, going for
> better memory, makes no economic sense. But that has not stopped
> people from spending hundreds of dollars on the fastest memory they
> can find.
>
> http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLAFN
>
> Intel Core2 Extreme Processor QX6850
> 3 GHz, FSB1333, 8MB L2. 130W, CPUID 06FB hex, socket LGA775 (desktop)
>
> 5365 is not listed, so I have to use 5355 instead. It does
> look to be the same processor, only in a different socket.
> So the 5365 probably has the same stats, only runs at 3GHz.
> It is possible the power spec could be different, and be 130W
> like the QX6850.
>
> http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLAEG
>
> Intel Xeon Processor X5355
> 2.66 GHz, FSB1333, 8MB L2. 120W, CPUID 06FB hex, socket LGA771 (server)
>
> You can go here, and select "Intel Core2 Processor", then QX6850.
> A long list of boards is returned.
>
> http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
>
> Commando
> P5B P5B Deluxe
> P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP
> P5B Premium P5B-E P5B-E Plus P5K
> P5K Deluxe P5K Premium/WiFi-AP
> P5K SE
> P5K WS
> P5K3 Deluxe
> P5K3 Premium/WiFi-AP
> P5KC
> P5K-E/WiFi-AP
> P5KPL-VM
> P5K-V
> P5NT WS
> P5W DH Deluxe
> P5W64 WS Professional
> P5WDG2 WS Professional
>
> The P5K are the latest, and are native FSB1333 chips. Some boards support
> DDR2 and some support DDR3, which means you have choices as to what to
> get.
>
> So the choice all boils down to which memory type offers the best
> performance
> FBDIMM, DDR2, or DDR3 ?
>
> Paul
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