PPC fast enough for today? I say no... Not for DVD encoding

[orestes1984]

Originally Posted by JCstudios

My PowerBook G4 take over 10 hours to encode a HD mp4 files.

It's just way toooo long.

I'm stressed.

What is your source? If they are MKVs. Try using something more modern like iFlicks to do a pass through conversion. Just try iFlicks in general it's more modern yet still runs on PPC.

[Michael Anthony]

Originally Posted by orestes1984

What is your source? If they are MKVs. Try using something more modern like iFlicks to do a pass through conversion. Just try iFlicks in general it's more modern yet still runs on PPC.

That's because a pass-through doesn't do anything... it literally just passes the feed from the original and into the new file container.

[orestes1984]

Originally Posted by Michael Anthony

That's because a pass-through doesn't do anything... it literally just passes the feed from the original and into the new file container.

I know how it works... If it's a H.264 file in an MKV container then you're recreating the wheel by running it through Handbrake where iFlicks will do it in the same time it takes to copy and paste the file. It will put it in an M4V container, add the metadata and put it into iTunes for you in 1 step.

iFlicks is the ducks guts for PPC and for most things in general. It's a solution worth paying for especially on PPC where there are limited solutions as it is.

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by orestes1984

I know how it works... If it's a H.264 file in an MKV container then you're recreating the wheel by running it through Handbrake where iFlicks will do it in the same time it takes to copy and paste the file. It will put it in an M4V container, add the metadata and put it into iTunes for you in 1 step.

iFlicks is the ducks guts for PPC and for most things in general. It's a solution worth paying for especially on PPC where there are limited solutions as it is.

Yeah I'll admit that whenever I have any video to transcode, I sent it off over Ethernet and use Remote Desktop to Handbrake it. Good setup I have here, I feel.

[wobegong]

The G5 shows its age really on things like video encoding, if it's casual at home (like mine is) then I don't really mind leaving it running overnight (processing phone video movies into iMovie, stablizing them (if my daughter took them...... ) and then converting the final result (last time 2.5 hours worth of footage plus added chapter markers, iMovie theme etc) using my Elgato .264 USB thingy (which speeds things up quite a bit but still slow by modern standard).

Of course I could use my MBP but I prefer working on a desktop and it's only the final export that drags.

Of course I may not mind waiting (overnight or even longer sometimes depending what the project is) because its personal 'work' and so not time critical.

Of course I do though have to pay the electricity bill that the G5 sucks up for all those processing hours when I could do it on my laptop in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost but I'm happy with that currently.

[wobegong]

Originally Posted by orestes1984

2 CPUs with 1 core on each CPU or 1 CPU with 2 cores, it's the same thing.

Nope. Dual CPU has 512k cache per CPU, Dual Core has 1Mb per core, these days CPU cache is seen as a very important factor (think old school cripplied Celerons (256k), Pentiums (512k commonly) and then Xeons (1Mb or even 2Mb cache) - These days i7's have 8Mb..

Not sure by how much but certainly doubling the cache and having the two CPU's on a single chip will certainly have an impact on work like encoding.

You can refer to this which compares a Dual Core 2Ghz G5 with a 2 x Single Core 2Ghz G5, you'll see the Dual Core outperforms the Dual CPU on everything except those tasks which offload to the GPU.
http://www.barefeats.com/dc20.html

[throAU]

PowerPC CPUs are now slow. You had 8 years of usage out of them. Its time to let it go... time moves on and the newer CPU architectures have a lot of new instructions and architectural tricks to speed this sort of thing up massively.

For comparison, my 2011 MBP will rip and encode DVDs using handbrake in faster than 2-3x real time.

I.e., 120 minute DVD ripped and encoded in about 20-30 minutes.


Expecting an 8 year old machine to get anywhere within 1/5th of that speed is just not realistic.

[GermanyChris]

Originally Posted by throAU

PowerPC CPUs are now slow. You had 8 years of usage out of them. Its time to let it go... time moves on and the newer CPU architectures have a lot of new instructions and architectural tricks to speed this sort of thing up massively.

For comparison, my 2011 MBP will rip and encode DVDs using handbrake in faster than 2-3x real time.

I.e., 120 minute DVD ripped and encoded in about 20-30 minutes.


Expecting an 8 year old machine to get anywhere within 1/5th of that speed is just not realistic.

To many factors at play to make a statement like that..

[throAU]

OK find me an 8 year old desktop machine that gets within 20% of that encoding speed...

[orestes1984]

Originally Posted by throAU

OK find me an 8 year old desktop machine that gets within 20% of that encoding speed...

That's easy, get me a Socket 754 Athlon 64 3700+. It is essentially a single core version of the current intel CPU arch and it's pretty much the turning point that got us to where we are now with the current AMD/Intel CPUs, it's well known that when AMD killed off the Itanium, Intel basically copied the Athlon 64 CPU arch and its pretty much the same arch we're using now with Intel Macs.

The only issue is the lack of SMP due to it of course being a single core CPU and it being the last processor you could really lock with a single rogue process. But for a per core CPU Athlon 64s were blisteringly fast and will handle everything including encoding and playing 1080p, you just don't have a fallback CPU core when you max out your single core. This means everything basically grinds to a halt rather then having load balancing through SMP with a multi-core system. However, the Athlon 64 was a game changing desktop CPU.

The only thing that's really been changed since then is the addition of Hyper Threading to the arch and reintroduction of Turbo Boost technology, but a single core Athlon 64 basically destroyed everything including the G5. 2003 was the year when I made the wrong bet of jumping from my G4 iMac and going with Windows XP without knowing that Apple would soon follow with Intel on the same CPU arch we're still on 8 years later.

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by orestes1984

That's easy, get me a Socket 754 Athlon 64 3700+. It is essentially a single core version of the current intel CPU arch and it's pretty much the turning point that got us to where we are now with the current AMD/Intel CPUs, it's well known that when AMD killed off the Itanium, Intel basically copied the Athlon 64 CPU arch and its pretty much the same arch we're using now with Intel Macs.

The only issue is the lack of SMP due to it of course being a single core CPU and it being the last processor you could really lock with a single rogue process. But for a per core CPU Athlon 64s were blisteringly fast and will handle everything including encoding and playing 1080p, you just don't have a fallback CPU core when you max out your single core. This means everything basically grinds to a halt rather then having load balancing through SMP with a multi-core system. However, the Athlon 64 was a game changing desktop CPU.

The only thing that's really been changed since then is the addition of Hyper Threading to the arch and reintroduction of Turbo Boost technology, but a single core Athlon 64 basically destroyed everything including the G5. 2003 was the year when I made the wrong bet of jumping from my G4 iMac and going with Windows XP without knowing that Apple would soon follow with Intel on the same CPU arch we're still on 8 years later.

Sorry I must call out on this; I remember six months ago when I sold a quad core 3.1GHz Athlon FX that was nearly outperformed in CPU performance by Sandy Bridge <2GHz Macbook Airs.

[orestes1984]

Originally Posted by Jethryn Freyman

Sorry I must call out on this; I remember six months ago when I sold a quad core 3.1GHz Athlon FX that was nearly outperformed in CPU performance by Sandy Bridge <2GHz Macbook Airs.

However that is an intel CPU what your asking is 8 year old comparisons and what I can tell you is the Athlon 64 was light years ahead of the G5, sure a more modern CPU on the same arch is going to be faster but that's not what you asked.

If you want something that's 20% as fast as modern CPUs and faster than a G5 get me a socket 754 motherboard and a single core Athlon 64 3700+ I will even tap dance to fiddler on the roof's "If I were a rich man" about the fact that it's going to be at least 20% as fast as modern CPUs and a whole lot faster than a G5.

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by orestes1984

However that is an intel CPU what your asking is 8 year old comparisons and what I can tell you is the Athlon 64 was light years ahead of the G5, sure a more modern CPU on the same arch is going to be faster but that's not what you asked.

If you want something that's 20% as fast as modern CPUs and faster than a G5 get me a socket 754 motherboard and a single core Athlon 64 3700+ I will even tap dance to fiddler on the roof's "If I were a rich man" about the fact that it's going to be at least 20% as fast as modern CPUs and a whole lot faster than a G5.

I'm talking about what was current in November 2011, my 3.1GHz quad core AMD Athlon FX x64 score around 3,900 in Geekbench, current MBAs were scoring in the high 5K+, can't recall the exact stats though.

Not that it really mattered; the fact that my AMD PC had a Radeon 6770 meant it completely trounced the ****** Intel integrated stuff in a MBA.

[wobegong]

Just out of curiosity I tried this tonight :-

PM G5 DC 2.3Ghz (as per my signature)
Elgato Turbo 264 USB Encode Accelerator

Used a (unencrypted) DVD with a running time of 1hour 49 minutes.

Just dragged the DVD icon to the Elgato Turbo App. Didn't wait for it to finish but I know the estimate on this is always pretty accurate so waited for 10 minutes for it to settle down.

Source : DVD Drive (standard one)
Destination : SATA HD
Encoded to : AppleTV H.264
Estimated Completion time (total) = 1 Hour
Settled FPS = 55+

Not bad for a G5......Sure beats this guys 7 hours....

[throAU]

If a single core athlon 64 is 20% the speed of my i7 2720 running 8 threads at near on 100% in handbrake, I'll be very, very surprised.


geekbench is a synthetic benchmark, and doesn't measure reality perfectly. compare for example a core2 which does not have AES acceleration instructions to a core i5 that does - geekbench will perhaps show a 2-3x improvement. the AES instructions improve throughput on AES encryption by 25-30x.

There are other similar improvements to other tasks with other new CPU instructions.

----------

Originally Posted by Jethryn Freyman

Sorry I must call out on this; I remember six months ago when I sold a quad core 3.1GHz Athlon FX that was nearly outperformed in CPU performance by Sandy Bridge <2GHz Macbook Airs.

Exactly... the core i7 in my MBP totally smokes the Core2 Quad in my previous desktop. So much faster its not even close.

[orestes1984]

I remember going from my Athlon 64 3500+ (Apparently competitive with a 3.5ghz P4 of the time) to my Q6600 Core Quad, the difference was night and day, but I suspect it wouldn't have been as much going from an Athlon 64x2 a lot of the issues I ran into with the Athlon 64 in the end was hard locking the CPU which was capable of more, but could only deal with 1 thread with nowhere else to offload to. As you say synthetic benchmarks aren't really accurate one way or another so not really a gauge. Going from my core quad to my i5 dual with HT, yeah it was noticeable but not so much.

The big transition was somewhere around 2006 when people started seeing the benefits of SMP and Hyper Threading on a decent CPU like the Core 2 rather than the P4s. It also was where Intel took over AMD substantially and Apple jumped ship.

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by orestes1984

The big transition was somewhere around 2006 when people started seeing the benefits of SMP and Hyper Threading on a decent CPU like the Core 2 rather than the P4s. It also was where Intel took over AMD substantially and Apple jumped ship.

Yeah that's what I think is the issue with PPC Macs, they were ditched by Apple before that transition took place so they never really got to take explicit advantage of their multiple CPUs.

[wobegong]

Bloomberg is reporting today that Apple may plan to switch again in 2017 from Intel to their own ARM based chips following their purchase of PA Semi...

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by wobegong

Bloomberg is reporting today that Apple may plan to switch again in 2017 from Intel to their own ARM based chips following their purchase of PA Semi...

With that time frame it seems more likely, so long as ARM improves enough to match Intel.