8 Cores, What's the advantage?

[hoihtah]

I have a dual xeon (harpertown) system which I built for video editing purposes.
However, none of the video editing softwares that I use seem to take advantage of all 8 cores.
I use Vegas Pro 8.0b and Premiere Pro 3.0... both the latest versions.

On vegas, it seems to use 4 cores at a time at about 25% cpu utilization during rendering...
while Premiere uses all 8 ... but only uses about 15% of each cpu.

I did a quick search on the web, and i see many others having same issues... (most of them with quad cores).

So... my question is, if not from video editing... how can i benefit from having 8 cores?

For workstations... why would anyone use 8 core system?

What do people use it for?

Any other 8 core users at AT?

 

[Nathelion]

An awesome F&H box?

Maybe the video editing you are running just isn't demanding enough to use all that processing power? Or maybe you are memory bandwidth limited or otherwise bottlenecked?

It has been my impression that 8-cores are mostly useful if you are running a server or custom software that can take advantage of it.

 

[Seggybop]

I haven't experienced this personally, but in theory the software will try to make maximum use of all available resources. So if your CPU utilization is only 15-25% there's probably a bottleneck somewhere else in the system, where the CPU isn't being maxed because some other part of the system can't feed it data fast enough to fill it to capacity. Hard drive maybe?

 

[graysky]

Originally posted by: hoihtah
I have a dual xeon (harpertown) system which I built for video editing purposes.
However, none of the video editing softwares that I use seem to take advantage of all 8 cores.
I use Vegas Pro 8.0b and Premiere Pro 3.0... both the latest versions.

On vegas, it seems to use 4 cores at a time at about 25% cpu utilization during rendering...
while Premiere uses all 8 ... but only uses about 15% of each cpu.

I did a quick search on the web, and i see many others having same issues... (most of them with quad cores).

So... my question is, if not from video editing... how can i benefit from having 8 cores?

For workstations... why would anyone use 8 core system?

What do people use it for?

Any other 8 core users at AT?

It's the software dude. x264 does a much better job. You can download my x264 Benchmark HD and run it on that machine. See how it compares to the other dual quad systems in the data table. If you do end-up running it, please let me know what the CPU usage was for pass 1 and pass2.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: hoihtah


So... my question is, if not from video editing... how can i benefit from having 8 cores?

For workstations... why would anyone use 8 core system?

What do people use it for?

Any other 8 core users at AT?

You just need software that takes advantage of the 8 cores.
For workstations, 8 cores sometimes isn't enough.
I do 3d renders in programs like 3dsmax, Maya, and they will use all cores available at 100%.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: hoihtah
On vegas, it seems to use 4 cores at a time at about 25% cpu utilization during rendering...
while Premiere uses all 8 ... but only uses about 15% of each cpu.

4 x 25% = 100% (this means you are really only using 1 core, not 4)

8 x 12.5% = 100% (this means you are really only using 1 core, not 8)

At first glance it appears both programs are actually single-threaded and the operating system is "load balancing" all the cores which is why it looks like all the cores are being somewhat utilized.

If you run a single-threaded application on a quad-core system then taskmanager will report that each core is 25% loaded. It does not mean the program is multi-threaded nor does it mean that something else in your system is the bottleneck.

A system bottleneck on a multi-threaded program will more often than not have the resulting core utilization sum equal something other than 100%. My backup program for example is multithreaded but bottlenecked such that all the cores are loaded to about 92%.

VegasPro technical specs says it has "improved multiprocessor support"...which sounds all too familiar from the days of when photoshop tried to pass itself off as multi-processor capable only you'd then find out it was just a handful of special filters that were multi-threaded while 99% of what you wanted to do was single-threaded.

Premiere Pro 3.0 is known to not be multi-threaded. According to wiki it was released with a dual-thread support for some features back in 1998 (sounds way to familiar to the photoshop situation)...but a quick search of the web pretty much confirms that it is not multi-threaded...in addition Adobe makes no mention of whether it uses multiple threads or not (a sure indicator that it doesn't...)

 

[wwswimming]

is someone wants a trial of 3DS Max, or Maya -

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/s...=5659302&siteID=123112

it's a full-function 30 day trial.

in the 2005 timeframe the tutorials were given away free; can't find
them now. there's one in particular, "animated symmetry", that was
simple looking but ran overnight on a single core 3.6 Pentium 4.

it would be mucho de faster on that there 8-core workstation.

 

[graysky]

...or you could try out the x264 benchmark HD which is known to work on 8 core systems

 

[Zumbador]

How much RAM you got?

I'm not sure about Premiere, but Adobe recommends 1.6GB of RAM per core for AE CS3. So rounding up to 2GB per core, you should have 16GB.

 

[graysky]

@zumbador - 1.6 Gb / core? That is very wasteful if true! Functionally, that means people will need 8 gigs of RAM/quad core processor.

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: Zumbador
How much RAM you got?

I'm not sure about Premiere, but Adobe recommends 1.6GB of RAM per core for AE CS3. So rounding up to 2GB per core, you should have 16GB.

the system has 2x 2gb fbdimm. so nowhere near that 16gb that you're talking about.
i suppose i can max out the system with 16gb of ram to test if it makes any difference.

but the bottleneck really seems to be on the software side.

i'll try x264 benchmark HD and let you guys know how much of the 8 cores the system is utilizing.

it's becoming more clear that the software side of things are way behind the hardware specs.
i mean, besides 3d rendering softwares, there's just no reason to get 8 core system.

 

[taltamir]

1.6 x 8 = 12.8GB of RAM. There is no need to round up something like that.
And that is for adobe... but still 8 - 16GB of ram is a must for such a system.

But basically, it is as Idontcare said. You are running a SINGLE threaded app that is using only ONE core. And windows is telling you it is doing 25 or 12.5%, but that is of the TOTAL CPU power for the system, not PER core. (probably alternating core, each core runs for 12.5% of a time unit, and then it switches the thread to another core)

Originally posted by: hoihtah
it's becoming more clear that the software side of things are way behind the hardware specs.
i mean, besides 3d rendering softwares, there's just no reason to get 8 core system.

That is what all the reviews say, and have been saying for a long long time...
Actually, the only thing that can use 4 cores properly (over 2 cores) is home video encoding. and winrar Some software at least.

That is why people are still buying dual core for gaming machines... makes more sense, and the higher ghz means that each core works faster, resulting in BETTER performance on single and dual threaded apps.

 

[tylerw13]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Premiere Pro 3.0 is known to not be multi-threaded. According to wiki it was released with a dual-thread support for some features back in 1998 (sounds way to familiar to the photoshop situation)...but a quick search of the web pretty much confirms that it is not multi-threaded...in addition Adobe makes no mention of whether it uses multiple threads or not (a sure indicator that it doesn't...)

i acutally have premiere pro and it uses all 4 cores perfectly @ 100 percent usage so i dont know if what you are saying is correct.

just a thought

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: tylerw13

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Premiere Pro 3.0 is known to not be multi-threaded. According to wiki it was released with a dual-thread support for some features back in 1998 (sounds way to familiar to the photoshop situation)...but a quick search of the web pretty much confirms that it is not multi-threaded...in addition Adobe makes no mention of whether it uses multiple threads or not (a sure indicator that it doesn't...)

i acutally have premiere pro and it uses all 4 cores perfectly @ 100 percent usage so i dont know if what you are saying is correct.

just a thought

how are you getting it to utilize 100%?
i haven't tried it out on my quad core system... but if what you say is true, i'd move all my files over to that one.

i was even thinking about installing osx, just to see if things are better on the mac side.

 

[taltamir]

do you have all the drivers installed and updated?
Do you have the latest version of premier?
Did you look in the option to see if there is a "enable multithreading" checkbox you need to select?

 

[tylerw13]

Originally posted by: hoihtah

Originally posted by: tylerw13

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Premiere Pro 3.0 is known to not be multi-threaded. According to wiki it was released with a dual-thread support for some features back in 1998 (sounds way to familiar to the photoshop situation)...but a quick search of the web pretty much confirms that it is not multi-threaded...in addition Adobe makes no mention of whether it uses multiple threads or not (a sure indicator that it doesn't...)

i acutally have premiere pro and it uses all 4 cores perfectly @ 100 percent usage so i dont know if what you are saying is correct.

just a thought

how are you getting it to utilize 100%?
i haven't tried it out on my quad core system... but if what you say is true, i'd move all my files over to that one.

i was even thinking about installing osx, just to see if things are better on the mac side.

i honestly cant tell you that there was something special i did...i just intalled it and it worked...sorry man for not being much help...something has to be holding it back though it should work...ill try to post a pict of mine working @ it just so you can see...sorry i cant help