Intel 8 Core Media Creation PC

An 8 core workstation class system that gives excellent performance in multimedia content creation applications

Thursday, August 09, 2007

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We have covered a lot on multi-core processor technologies in the past and have also reviewed many servers and workstations which use multi-core technologies. Here we present an exclusive preview of an 8 core media creation PC based on the Intel Workstation board S500XVN. It came to us loaded with dual Quad-core Intel Xeon X5365 processors. As the name suggests, this is meant for media creation, so to test it, we tested it with a variety of media creation benchmarks. To ensure that the OS didn't become a bottleneck, we ran all benchmarks on a 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate edition.

We ran both synthetic and media creation/rendering benchmarks on it. These included PCMark 2005, 3DMark 2006 and Open CPU benchmarks. Plus, we also stressed it withvideo encoding and rendering applications. Our objective was simple--to gauge the difference between applications running on a single core vis-à-vis multiple cores. As the results show, there was a significant difference in the encoding time. For video encoding, we converted a 500 MB movie CD to WMV format. For this, we used Media Encoder 9-first on a single core and subsequently on all the cores. What took 160 minutes to do with a single core took only 67 minutes to complete with all eight cores. We then repeated the same process using the PovRay benchmark. Once again, the results can be seen in the graphs below. In the Open CPU benchmark, the CPU score increased with an increase in the number of cores, but only till 4 cores. After that, the score became constant. Possibly, the benchmark was not geared to use all the cores. One small caveat we found was that the board had only one PCI-Express 16x slot. So you won't be able to benefit from multipe graphics cards and use nVidia's SLI or ATI's CrossFire technologies.

The time to encode a 500 MB movie file reduced considerably as we increased cores

All benchmarks except Open CPU showed a steady rise in performance with an increase in the number of cores

Bottom Line: The machine will be a real boon for media creation professionals, with the kind of performance it delivers.

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