Hyperthreading was done to make single core procs more like dual processor machines. It becomes a bit of a mute point when you go dual core and higher. Not to mention that HT is really quite a useless process for anything that's efficient with it's CPU utilization, and in fact HT slowed things down when multi-core support came out on Vegas, because it requires some resources to thread on a single core proc. and Vegas already did such a good job of utilization that it was detrimental to waste those resources.
anyone feel free to correct me where I'm mistaken, if I'm mistaken.
I blieve it is Core 2 QX 6800 in the entire Intel processor Newegg listing and it also states Quad 4. I only looked at the quad 4's. Gee, it's been about a half hour, maybe I should check the list again as there might be "Quad 8's"
JJK
I read somewhere that Intel found in some of its processors (the P4 for example) that due to bottlenecks in the architecture, the CPU ended up wasting bus cycles in an idle state, waiting for something to work its way through the bottleneck. So they devised a way to make another thread execute during those wait cycles. Hence hyperthreading was born.
A quad core will show up as 4 processors (of course), and Vegas will use all of them during a render, unless you have a single threaded FX, which will cause only one thread to operate during that portion of the timeline.
Vegas (as far as I know) won't make use of more than 4 cores. That means if you have 8 cores 4 of them will be mostly idle during a render. If you turned on hyperthreading, which CPUs are idle? Real ones or virtual (due to hyperthreading), cores? I'd hate to turn on hyperthreading to get 8 cores, then find renders are slower because Vegas latched onto fake cores (the HT ones) for any of the 4 it can utilize.
Hyperthreading has nothing to do with the number of physical cores a processor may have. Hyperthreading was a way for Intel to regain some of the performance lost due to the extremely long pipeline of the Netburst P4 architecture. In a nutshell ,out of order instructions, branch stalls, and other inefficiencies magnified by the long P4 pipeline (31 stages in Prescott) were killing performance. If Intel had not run into thermal limitations with the P4 it would have probably scaled to 7 or 8GHz. I say this because if you look around you will see examples of phase change cooling doing such high frequencies.
We are lucky Intel had to resort to hyperthreading actually because being the 900lb gorilla they are once hyperthreading processors started to appear software companies started writing multithreading software. So now that just about all new cpus's are dual core we old the good old P4 and it's hyperthreading for the fact that many applications are taking advantage of both of those cores. It's funny how things work sometimes. Intel releases hyperthreading, software manufacturers respond, and then AMD blows them out of the water with X2. Of course they came charging back with Core 2 Duo in July... but that's another story.
On the other hand the Core 2 Duo is much better matched thermally with it's frequency limitation. With a shorter (14 stages) more efficient pipeline Core 2 Duo will probably top out around 3.5GHz on the current 65nm process. Hitting a silicon gate switching limitation before a thermal limitation, the reverse of the P4. I doubt Intel will be caught with it's pants down anytime soon.
Finally, the AMD X2 is quite simply blown out of the water by the Core 2 Duo, just as the X2 blew the P4 out of the water.
Clock-for-clock Core 2 Duo is on average 20% faster than AMD X2. Couple that with the fact that you are lucky to get an X2 running at 3.0GHz while just about any Core 2 Duo will do 3.2GHz+ and you have a complete obliteration of AMD at this point in time.
And the Intel quad core is actually two dual core wafers in one chip, while the AMD quad solution is currently 2 separate dual core processors.
AMD is still at 90nm while Intel has been at 65nm for quite some time. By the time AMD moves to 65nm Intel will have moved to 45nm, putting them a full process technology ahead of AMD.
I am not a fan of either manufacturer, I'm just calling them as I see them, and as the benchmarks present themselves.
If you're going to buy a new system do yourself a favor and have a look at the benchmarks. They speak for themselves.
The advantage of hyperthreading depends on the application... for some apps, you see a 50% speed increase and for other apps you might see a reduction in performance like -5%.
2- For Vegas, I don't think hyperthreading did much (back in the single processor days). It was a toss-up whether leaving it on or off gave better performance.
3- The reason for the wide range in hyperthreading improvement is due to CPU architecture and what your software code does. The most practical thing to do is just to time some renders with hyperthreading on versus hyperthreading off.
any suggestions re what would give the biggest vegas render-time performance improvement, from my P4 2.8 cpu? I'd like to build a new render pc w/an asus mobo if possible...if I can get a significant (40%+) improvement in vegas render speeds..
Looking through the evaluations at THG, there's precious little between any of the Core 2 Duo mobos in terms of speed. I think the choice will be more dictated by what features, I/O and slots you need.
One thing that worries me about all these newer mobos is they're so games targetted you loose out on the number of useable slots and firewire ports.
My ancient Gigabyte mobo has 3 1394, more USB than I can remember and enough PCI slots for anything I'm likely to need. Can't seem to get that flexibility on the new mobos. Sure I can plug a firewire card into it, if I can find a slot for it. At the same time I can never see me needing THREE video cards, can I plug anything other than a video card into those PCI-E slots?
I would suggest the following. I'm using it in Vegas and it is about 4 times faster on average than my old P4 3.06.
Asus P5B-Deluxe - This board uses TI integrated firewire chipset. Usually integrated firewire is a no-no for serious work but this board has been 100% reliable for me.
Corsair TwinX 6400C4 (2GB) memory. I got this memory as I knew I'd be overclocking and I wanted 4-4-4-12 timings at 800Mhz memory speed.
Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo. Stock speed is 2.13GHz. Stock is FSB266x8 (chip multiplier)=2133MHz. I changed the memory frequency to 400 and am running 8x400=3200MHz. Remember DDR2 is double pumped so 400MHz is effectively 800 for memory and 1600 for FSB (quad pumped). Also I am running stock voltage.
Thermaltake Big Typhoon cpu cooler - I knew I'd be overclocking and wanted a good, quiet cooler. My idle temp is 40C and load is 50C. Very reasonable.
Lian Li 7B Plus II Aluminum case - Just make sure you get a case with good airflow and big enough to fit the components you need.
Seasonic S430 Power Supply - Whatever you do make sure you get a quality power supply. This one is quiet, efficient, and reliable.
I basically put the system together started it up, restarted, made a few changes in the bios and have been running 3.2GHz ever since.
The performance improvement from my P4 is incredible.
Remember that NO overclocks are guaranteed and although *most" Core 2 Duos are hitting 3GHz+ there is always a chance of getting one that will not. Regardless even at stock you'll still have a great system that is capable of taking quad core cpu's.
"The advantage of hyperthreading depends on the application... for some apps, you see a 50% speed increase and for other apps you might see a reduction in performance like -5%."
If the application is multi-threaded you will *almost* always see a performance increased. There are some server situations where a performance decrease can be seen. I don't think many people here are building servers though.
Video editing is one application where hyperthreading has shown significant performance gains if the program was optimized for multi-threads. TMPGEnc is one example that works beautifully with hyperthreading/dual cores.
Remember, if the app is faster with dual cores it will also show improvements with hyperthreading although not as great because there aren't actually two cores in the hyperthreaded cpu.
"2- For Vegas, I don't think hyperthreading did much (back in the single processor days). It was a toss-up whether leaving it on or off gave better performance."
Until Vegas was multi-threaded of course hyperthreading wouldn't do anything! Again, hyperthreading emulates a dual cpu computer. If the application is not multi-threaded then no gains will be realized, only one logical cpu will be utilized.
3- The reason for the wide range in hyperthreading improvement is due to CPU architecture and what your software code does. The most practical thing to do is just to time some renders with hyperthreading on versus hyperthreading off.
Yes. If the software is multi-threaded you will see performance gains with hyperthreading and/or dual core cpu's. I agree, do some tests and find out for yourself. I have done countless tests over the years. I saw minimal gains in V5 and V6 with hyperthreading. I don't own my P4 anymore so I never tested V7 with it. But I can tell you that V7 makes excellent use of my Core 2 Duo.
Mark, thanks a million for the tips, sounds like we're on the same wavelength, I use an asus p4b in a lian li case w/extra cpu fans etc... your setup sounds like a great one to upgrade render speeds with etc... I'm using win2k but I will probably need to use xp (or wait for vista?) to make the most of the new threading speeds/software models..
Ken,
My son just built another system almost identical to Mark's. His time on the render test (new one on the VASST site) was 20.06 minutes. Here's the list of what we bought from Newegg:
1 Microsoft Windows XP Home with SP2 - Retail
Item #: N82E16837116193 $189.99
1 RAIDMAX SMILODON ATX-612WBP Black SECC STEEL ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply - Retail Item #: N82E16811156062 $89.99
ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail Item #: N82E16813131028 $196.99
You said: "Hyperthreading was done to make single core procs more like dual processor machines. It becomes a bit of a mute point when you go dual core and higher."
Actually Intel will apparently be reintroducing an enhanced hyperthreading feature into it's multicores perhaps as earlier as 07. HT was a technology that improved responsiveness in Windows systems for multitasking.
"Actually Intel will apparently be reintroducing an enhanced hyperthreading feature into it's multicores perhaps as earlier as 07." If Intel is actually going this route, then they are still struggling with the microcoding of the instruction set in the pipeline execution. The "ideal" depth of a pipeline with an interrupt structure, with large "smart caches" is the magic number 8. A poorly design instruction set with a "narrow" hardware layout usually results in deep pipelines, 18- 40. Character strings operations and FP calculations usually always have their own hardware. Intel in the past has used the char hardware as a "hyperthreading" feature that borrowed "not in use" ALUs, a nice feature if the microcoding was better managed.
AMD has in the past done a better job of managing the pipeline+cache with slow memory. Now that Intel has saw the light, AMD knows that the faster memory speeds are required and with bigger caches. But the faster memory cycles do not produce much improvements because the cache management needs new prediction microcoding. This can be a be long discussion, so, AMD current and future products have already won over IBM for supercomputers because Intel made one big mistake in the caching design with Duo2core, which they scrambling to fix.
But outside DOD or Banking or Aerospace, I like the Duo2cores for laptops or desktops. I would prefer 4cpus vs 2cpus with hyperthreading simply because the caches performance can be fine tuned and most programmers can think and program better in non-hyperthreading land.
> any suggestions re what would give the biggest vegas render-time performance improvement, from my P4 2.8 cpu? I'd like to build a new render pc w/an asus mobo if possible...if I can get a significant (40%+) improvement in vegas render speeds..
Ken, how about 600% improvement (yes, that's 6x!!!) I just built a new PC on John Cline's recommendation (Thank you John for saving me the headaches of messing with the non-functional 680i boards) and it is scary fast. An Intel D975XBX2 motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme (QX6700) processor. The specs are on the PC Equipment page of my web site with some Vegas 7 rendering times. (HDV to MPEG2 in 1.25x, that's near real-time!, DV to MPEG2 in 0.4x that's more that twice as fast as realtime!!!) It does the original Vegas render test in 14 seconds flat. My AMD X2 4600+ took 39 seconds.
For comparison, my AMD X2 4600+ was 3x faster than my Pentium 4 3.0Ghz. So if you bought a new DualCore you would still get a 3x improvement. My new Intel Core 2 Quad is again 3x faster than the AMD X2 or 6x faster than the Pentium 4! Of course it cost a lot more but you get what you pay for. Vegas takes full advantage of all 4 CPU cores.
As for you wanting an ASUS motherboard: I have owned Gigabyte motherboards and I've owned ASUS motherboards and in general the customer support stinks and the user's guide is useless and written in broken Chinese/English. By contrast, the Intel documentation is far superior. The Intel customer support is also far superior. I had a problem with my hard drive light not working after the initial assembly. I called Intel and I actually got to speak to a human being and that human actually spoke ENGLISH! He said, "I have a demo system here that I can play with, can I call you back in 10 minutes?" I said, "sure". 10 minutes later he called me back with the BIOS tweak I needed to get my hard dive light working. I don't think you will ever get service like that from ASUS or Gigabyte. Just something to consider. Intel processor, Intel chipset, Intel motherboard. It just works!
IMHO, if you want the fastest system for rendering, QuadCore is the way to go. The performance improvement in Vegas is directly proportional to the price and that's a good thing.
Or, conversely I would like to run any benchmark you've run if you can provide a link. I really want to know if the Quad is being used effectively by Vegas 7.
I'm currently running an E6400 overclocked to 3.2GHz.
"I really want to know if the Quad is being used effectively by Vegas 7."
Yes, absolutely, without question.
I have virtually the same system that JohnnyRoy just put together. Editing and rendering HDV on my Quad is smoother and faster than editing plain DV was on my "old" 3.4gHz P4 with 2GB RAM. In my mind, the old complaints about Vegas not supporting any kind of "exernal" rendering hardware have been pretty much put to rest. Vegas on this Quad machine is, as JohnnyRoy put it; scary fast!
JohnnyRoy and John Cline testing of the intel core4 for vegas users is a good example of a great vegas editing station at a reasonable price. If you must buy now, follow Roy's or Cline's system hardware description, great $/performance ratio, and it won't require additional air conditioning. This should edit the new Sony codec with a good frame rate!