...I just got my nMP in and for h264 compression, the nMP is about 5 times slower....the D500 on the nMP isn't supported hence when doing conversion to H264...
As already discussed, even though Compressor, Handbrake and FCP X support QuickSync, Xeon CPUs do not have QuickSync transcoding instructions. This is because QuickSync depends on Intel's on-chip GPU:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/harnessing-handbrake
This Intel web site implies Quick Sync is (currently) inextricably tied to their on-chip GPU:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...uick-sync-video/quick-sync-video-general.html
I've never seen an explanation for the chain of decisions which led Intel to this situation. They may have felt Quick Sync was a narrow-purpose consumer technology, or Xeon just couldn't afford the transistor budget at the current state of fabrication technology. Even the low-end on-chip HD Graphics 2500 GPU takes about 400 million transistors (out of 1.4 billion available in Haswell and lower-end Xeons):
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1250/hd-graphics-2500.html
From this standpoint lower-end Xeons would be wasting nearly 30% of their transistor budget on a GPU they'd never use, since those envisioned platforms always have dedicated discrete GPUs. They have a vital need to deploy those transistors for workstation-class functions like larger caches, ERC memory, etc.
Intel made those design decisions several years ago. They likely didn't envision the current ironic situation with consumer-class CPUs with Quick Sync out-performing workstation-class Xeons in narrow transcoding tasks.
Quick Sync is essentially a "one trick pony", but a very useful one. It is limited to certain codecs and certain parameters, e.g, single-pass H.264, MPEG-2, etc. However those are commonly used. But -- if you do multi-pass H.264, e.g. in FCP X select "better quality H.264" (Export->Master File->Settings), it is much slower. The base nMP is faster than the fastest 2013 iMac on that task.
In theory the nMP's immensely fast GPU could be harnessed for transcoding but that's a different programming model and may take longer to upgrade software for that. Also, page 10 of Intel's IDF13 white paper implies a GPU (while more flexible) still can't achieve the transcoding performance of Quick Sync.
https://intel.activeevents.com/sf13/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=1178 This is because Quick Sync is essentially an on-chip ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), whereas a GPU is a more general-purpose device.
Despite this limitation, a Mac Pro is more broadly useful for video editing than even the highest end iMac (which I have). I am always waiting on the iMac to finish rendering, since that is a largely compute-bound task. More cores would be useful, which are only available on the Mac Pro.
