Audio and Video Encoding

The results obtained during video and audio encoding are pretty curious. When we use a DivX codec, that has recently acquired multi-threading support, Pentium Extreme Edition 965 shows faster encoding speed. Thanks to the Hyper-Threading technology support that allows processing four computational threads simultaneously, it gets significantly ahead of the Athlon 64 FX-60. However, the results obtained from other codecs are not so inspiring for the Intel’s newcomer. For example, H.264 format is getting more and more popular these days. So when we encode video into this format with Apple Quicktime, Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor manages only to get even with Athlon 64 FX-60. And the translation of the sound files into mp3 format with Apple iTunes even gives the victory to the AMD CPU. So, we cannot state that any of the competing architectures - K8 or NetBurst – is more efficient for digital media content encoding tasks. Everything depends on the codec type and optimization.