New Intel Processors - ?faster AVCHD editing

Richard Jones wrote on 9/6/2009, 2:41 AM

JefUK gave the following information in the AV Forum and has agreed that I may copy it here as it may be of interest to Vegas editors.

A new range of Intel processors, and their associated chipsets will be launched next week. These will redefine higher-end mainstream PC's and be especially important by providing the processing power for easy editing/encoding AVCHD at a lower cost. They will replace the current quad-core Core 2 parts, and Q1 2010 will see the replacement of the current dual-core processors.

The new processors to be launched next week will be:-

Core i5-750
Core i7-860
Core i7-870

These are all quad-core and will join the existing i7-920, i7-950, and i7-975 chips. The current i7-900 series chips have a tri-channel memory controller, Hyperthreading, and a Quickpath communication bus. The new i7 800 series will have a dual-channel memory controller, Hyperthreading, and a DMI bus. The 700 series have dual-channel memory controller, and DMI communications bus.

The 700 and 800 series processors use a new chipset - the Intel P55 - and be cheaper than all the 900 series processors. The 900 series processors use the X58 chipset. Motherboards based on the P55 will be considerably cheaper than those using the X58 chipset. PC's using 700 or 800 series processors will be similar in price to today's Intel 8000/9000 series quad-core systems, although the first systems will probably be "premium" offerings to cash-in on the novelty.

The performance of these new processors, under certain conditions, can actually be faster than some of the current i7-900 series, and will therefore offer excellent value for money. The bad news is that using a 700 or 800 processor will at least require a new motherboard and DDR3 memory (current quad-cores use DDR2). They should all be very good at editing AVCHD, for which processor speed is the most critical factor. For AVCHD video editors concerned about the cost of current i7 based systems, they will be worth the wait.

Hope this is of interest.

Richard

Comments

MozartMan wrote on 9/6/2009, 5:10 AM

Thanks Richard for great news.

I just bought new Sony AVCHD camcorder and was thinking about building new i7 based PC during Christmas break.

InterceptPoint wrote on 9/6/2009, 5:33 AM

Do it. The Core-i7 processors are terrific. Do a search on this forum and you will get a lot of good advice on building you own Core-17 machine and the kind of AVCHD performance you can expect. I built my own last December and use it to edit the AVCHD from my Sony CX7 HD camcorder.

farss wrote on 9/6/2009, 5:49 AM

These new processor chips are lower performance cheaper versions of the current i7 chips as I understand it. How does that equate to faster AVCHD editing, surely the i7-975 would be the go if one needed to crunch AVCHD as smoothly as possible,

Bob.

srode wrote on 9/6/2009, 7:44 AM

I think the idea is to have computers that are less expensive (sub $800) off the shelf that does video easily. 920s are inexpensive but it's hard to find a decent motherboard under $250 so getting much under $1000 for a i7 is hard to do when you add a case, HDD, RAM, PS and OS.

Personally if I were building one today, I would spend the extra and buy the i7 instead of the new Intel chips and overclock to get close to the 975 in performance. The $700 saved vs the 975 could be spent on more RAM, Drives, Software, Video Card etc and go a long way..

Guy Bruner wrote on 9/6/2009, 8:16 AM

The current i7s are hyperthreaded while the new i5 processors are not. Also, prices on X58 motherboards are coming down. I have found quite a few that are under $200. If you don't need SLI, which most video editors do not, you can cut the costs even further. ASUS makes the P5T SE which is cheaper than their other boards that support multiple video cards for game-playing. Perhaps dual channel is slightly cheaper that tri-channel to implement on the MB, but the cost per GB is about the same for the memory.

MozartMan wrote on 9/6/2009, 8:27 AM

Is hyperthreading good or is it bad?

Guy Bruner wrote on 9/6/2009, 9:15 AM

Hyperthreading permits two instructions to be pipelined at the same time. It effectively doubles the number of cores, although the performance scaling is not quite double with 4 virtual cores versus what you would get with 8 physical cores. It is particularly effective with i7 processors because the memory controller is on the CPU die. It is less effective with memory controllers that are on the motherboard. To see how an i7 compares to a recent quad core, see this article at Anandtech.com.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/6/2009, 10:26 AM

The Core-i7 processors are terrific.

*naysayer alert*

Seems every time someone complains Vegas can't do something because it's crashing, they always have an Intel Core Duo, Quad or i7 CPU. Could be just the odds, but most of the issues people have with Vegas I don't have with a Phenom. EVERY time someone complains about something with Vegas crash's, freezing, etc. I check their system specs, it's always been Intel. Again, the vast majority here use Intel so it may just be odds, but.... it's not a great processor if vegas crashes/freezes/etc for everybody.

Again, I'm not saying don't buy it, I'm just saying you may want to do searches on the forum first & take a look yourself. Speed = worthless if there's a lot of downtime.

eVoke wrote on 9/8/2009, 7:30 AM

Newegg has them priced at the following -

Core i5 750 / 2.66GHz / Lynnfield - $209.99
Core i7 860 / 2.8GHz / Lynnfield - $299.99
Core i7 870 / 2.93GHz / Lynnfield - $579.99

jabloomf1230 wrote on 9/8/2009, 10:42 AM

One minor consideration. The P55 motherboards generally have only 4 DIMM sockets (Core i7/ socket 1366 mobos have 6), so you are going to be a bit limited for the moment, if you use 2GB sticks of DDR3 memory. Although that sounds like it's enough RAM, that's only 2GB/core (or 1GB/thread, if you get a Core i7 800 series). Your limiting factor may not be the speed of the CPU(s), but rather the amount of RAM available to each core. This shouldn't be a problem for AVCHD previewing, but it could be a limiting factor in rendering output files, depending on the codec used.

With both Vista x64 and Win 7 x64 able to use large amounts of physical RAM, I suspect that software developers are going to be less judicious in their memory usage in the future.

jrazz wrote on 9/8/2009, 11:22 AM

I've used AMD every since I started building... until my most recent build which is a dual proc board based system. I use the intel extreme motherboard and two quad core processors in it. They are two quad core Xeon proc's. I also use 8 gigs of buffered ram and I have had zero issues with crashing or memory issues with this machine while in Vegas. It has been very stable and quite the improvement from my previous system (a dual core athlon based system).

j razz

John_Cline wrote on 9/8/2009, 2:05 PM

"Again, the vast majority here use Intel so it may just be odds"

There is way too little evidence to support your conclusion. It is just the odds.

ddm wrote on 9/8/2009, 5:14 PM

I have an older AMD dual core system that I keep in my office for odd jobs and on some vegas projects that I was having trouble with on my intel system, I would try it on my amd system with the same (or worse) results. This went back to vegas 8 and with 9, so I don't think it's an intel/quadcore thing, exclusively.

CorTed wrote on 9/8/2009, 7:11 PM

I preface this by saying this is only a thought, but I think the crashes etc. are more related to the amount of memory you have available.
I used to have many crashes usin V8 using 32bit and then 64 bit Vista. Then I upgraded to 8 gig of RAM, and V9.
I have been crash FREE.
Currenly running a 36 track HDV video with a render time of 16 hours.
It is humming along just fine.

Ted

IAM4UK wrote on 9/8/2009, 8:38 PM

Looks like these will sell for an inflated premium for awhile, over Intel's suggested retail prices. But the 860 looks like a sweet processor, faster than its similarly-priced Nehalem counterpart.

marvintpa wrote on 9/9/2009, 9:20 AM

My Core i7 machine (920, 12Gb RAM, RAID 0, 2 x 8600 GT cards) works very well for rendering AVCHD edits BUT.. preview is STILL shaky, particularly where transitions have been used. It seems to me that Sony need to harness GPU power to resolve this..

Piglover wrote on 9/9/2009, 9:41 AM

They don't need to go to GPU processing to fix preview. Their preview code is single threaded (prove it to yourself - open task manager's performance tab and watch your processor using during preview. Depending on your setup they have somewhere between 1 and 15 processor cores sitting idle during preview. With the top end of current CPUs and using v9b preview stutters aren't really all that bad. If they took the time to thread it preview would be GREAT!

I have a different complaint about Vegas preview. They can't get the de-interlace correct when previewing to a 2nd display instead of the preview window. This means my big, beautiful, 1080p display just looks like fuzzy cr@p during previews. It drives me crazy...

Hulk wrote on 9/9/2009, 8:16 PM

Ayy! There is a lot of misinformation in this thread.

Here is the full story. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634

First of all only the 750 is not Hyperthreaded. The 860 and 870 are Hyperthreaded.

Second the 870 can be faster than the 975 under certain circumstances since when not all four cores are loaded it will "turbo" up in clockspeed. 3.46GHz with two cores active and 3.6GHz with q core loaded. Believe it or not there are still quite a few applications that will not utilize quad core, and even those that do will not load them all the time. Even the i860 is as fast as the 975 (or nearly) with when apps only load 2 cores.

Finally the dual channel memory doesn't hurt performance much as all when it comes to video editing. Tri channel is more helpful with gaming.

Read the above link for the full details.

Bottom line is that you can get 975 performance now for MUCH less money than last week.

- Mark

busterkeaton wrote on 9/9/2009, 11:32 PM

I think the i5 is going to be a monster chip. You get better performance than some recent quad-cores and maybe 85% of the power of the fastest chips, but you can build a whole system for under a grand.

apit34356 wrote on 9/10/2009, 1:09 AM

"I think the i5 is going to be a monster chip." I think busterkeaton's right.

Tomsde wrote on 9/10/2009, 11:44 AM

I have an i7 2.67 gigahertz processor which I upgraded from a 2.44 Quad Core Duo. To be honest I've not seen a huge amount of faster processing power working with AVCHD on the timeline. I have seen an improvement in over all faster PC performance and rendering speeds in various programs. If you go for it go for the highest speed processor you can afford. I regret not going with the 2.99 gigahertz model instead, but overall I'm quite happy with my purchase.

Byron K wrote on 9/10/2009, 11:58 AM

It will be interesting to see what AMD's answer will be.

Video encoding performance specs look impressive:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634&p=12

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634&p=14

Hulk wrote on 9/10/2009, 5:53 PM

Tomsde,

It has been shown in the rendertest thread that unless you are running Vegas 64 bit you won't see a large performance difference between Nehalem and Penryn/Conroe Quads.

If you have a quad I wouldn't recommend upgrading to Nehalem unless you are running or moving to Vegas 64 bit.

On the other hand if you are buying/building a new system there is no reason not to go with i5/i7 as prices have come way down on the chips and supporting P55 chipsets.

- Mark

warriorking wrote on 9/11/2009, 9:19 AM

Being one who moved from a Quadcore Q9550 to a i7Core 920 I saw a very noticable improvement in Video rendering power, I knocked over an hour off my AVCHD rendering times in most cases, even more in others....