Just got a new 12-Core Mac Pro in my office.  Testing an export of a 45-minute timeline that took a 1hr15m on the previous 12-core Mac Pro.  Don't yet know the results. 

However, what I find interesting, is when you look at the activity monitor, the CPU usage hovers around only 30%.  I've read that Media Composer 7 is multi-threated, so why doesn't it max out the CPU usage?  

I've found the same thing for transcodes in MC 7.  Anyone have an answer for this?

Uli Kunkel:

Just got a new 12-Core Mac Pro in my office.  Testing an export of a 45-minute timeline that took a 1hr15m on the previous 12-core Mac Pro.  Don't yet know the results. 

However, what I find interesting, is when you look at the activity monitor, the CPU usage hovers around only 30%.  I've read that Media Composer 7 is multi-threated, so why doesn't it max out the CPU usage?  

I've found the same thing for transcodes in MC 7.  Anyone have an answer for this?

That is very interesting. I wonder how the CPU usage showed on your old Mac Pro, was it at 100% (or would it be 1200% for all 12 cores running at 100%)? Or was it running low like the 30% for the new Mac Pro?

The 30% figure might indicate slow media access relative to the speed of the new 12-core?

I am just about to purchase a new round Mac Pro. Wondering if I should spend the extra and get a six or eight Core machine. Does Avid make use of these cores to speed up Transcoding or rendering or what?

Thanks

db

Transcoding isn't all about raw processing. You have to access the source file, and store the output file. So there is a data movement overhead.

Also multithreading presents some other challenges. If you break a task like transcoding into chunks to be passed to the various cores you may have to wait on one core to complete before you can re-assemble and move on to the next batch.

Writing code to take advantage of multi cores/ threads is a complex business.

The question remains...