i7 with 50 cores?

[Sinc747]

Can you imagine VidBlaster on an i7 with 50 cores? Of course, Mike would have to rewrite parts of our favorite program to use the extra cores.

But 50 cores? Wow!

Read more here (http://dvice.com/archives/2011/11/intels-new-50-c.php).

[zenvideo]

You'll notice that the "Knights Corner" chip being referred to is in fact not a CPU but a "co-processor", as are (in their own way) the GPU chips on graphics cards, many of which already have far more cores than the CPU. Indeed, when I last talked to an Nvidia rep at a trade show, he was saying that many of their gaming cards had chips which in effect were far more powerful than the host CPU, which is perhaps not surprising when you consider the power consumption and heat-sink/cooling required for today's higher-end graphics card chipsets, like a GTX570, compared to a CPU like an i7 2600, for example.

As with any co-processor, additional software coding is required to fully take advantage of them, which can vary from chipset to chipset, but one only needs look at the extra real-time functionality that Adobe have added to Premiere CS5 when in GPU-accelerated mode to see just how much more powerful a co-processor can be than the CPU. However, it's clearly taken Adobe several (!) man-years to acheive this, so I wouldn't expect to see this sort of thing transforming VidBlaster any time soon, although naturally I'd be very impressed if it did. :)

[Mike]

@Tom: VidBlaster will already use all those cores if your setup is complex enough, but expecially for the less complex setups there is some room for improvement (aka my HD improvements).

@Martin: I've already explained several times on this forum why it makes no sense to use the GPU for any extensive form of processing, simply because many of us already hit the limits of the video bus. It's nice to unload the CPU by moving tasks to the GPU, but not if it means a reduced video frame rate. Obviously simple video editors do not have that problem. Using the GPU is pretty easy to do, but it would make things worse, not better. I can only repeat myself: invest in the CPU what you save on the GPU. It's that simple.

[jake]

@Martin: I've already explained several times on this forum why it makes no sense to use the GPU for any extensive form of processing, simply because many of us already hit the limits of the video bus. It's nice to unload the CPU by moving tasks to the GPU, but not if it means a reduced video frame rate. Obviously simple video editors do not have that problem. Using the GPU is pretty easy to do, but it would make things worse, not better. I can only repeat myself: invest in the CPU what you save on the GPU. It's that simple.

BoinxTV system requirements:
http://boinx.com/boinxtv/systemrequirements/
Graphics card - "The most important component and more relevant to the performance than the main processor is the graphics card as it is used for all the video composition and graphical effects."

VidBlaster choosing hardware:
http://wiki.vidblaster.com/index.php/Choosing_Hardware
Graphics card - "This is one of the least important components in the system."

The most important vs the least important. I cant understand. Why not use the GPU?

[Mike]

The GPU is used extensively, it's just that whatever card you buy these days it is more than capable of doing what is required of it. So it is very important, but at the same time you do not have to spend extra money on it. If you do buy one that is very expensive, you're spending all that money on better 3D support. Which is great for games, but not for video.

[coverthis]

Mike, Question regarding what you say of using up the bus, you just got me worried. We are using a graphics card in 8 lanes right now (iirc) and we have a revodrive that uses 2 lanes, that is the system drive, and it pushes huge numbers (approaching 1gb/s). Do you forsee us running in to problems if we fill the rest of the PCIx slots with 1-2x cards?