<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Paul Raison <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:paul@raison.org.uk">paul@raison.org.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I have noticed several postings of people using these boards as frontends. I am considering using one of these boards and not sure if a single core version will be upto what I need or if I need the dual core version, Is anyone using the single core version to playback HD material? I know the GPU is doing most of the work, but still wonder if single core is enough whilst playing HD material.<br>
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Any thoughts greatly appreciated!<br>
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Regards<br>
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Paul Raison<br></blockquote><div><br>It took me a little while to find this, it was an email I sent to MarcT off-list. <br><br>I bought the <font size="2">ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Atom N330</font> dual-core. It's got 4Gig of RAM and no hard-drive (I'm net-booting). <br>
<br>Here's the excerpt that includes some details. <br><div><br>At present, I'm still using the QT painter with .21, so YMMV.<br><br>I
expect the 230 would be plenty of power. Honestly, I'd have probably
gotten one of those instead, but they were out of stock (and Newegg was
predicting over a week before they might get back in stock). I had a
short window to get it set up, so had to go with the more expensive
model.<br>
<br>As far as numbers go, cat /proc/cpuinfo shows 4 'processors' (0-3). When playing Two and a Half Men HD, top shows:<br><br></div>top - 01:12:19 up 5:04, 1 user, load average: 1.32, 1.08, 0.63<br>Tasks: 84 total, 1 running, 83 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie<br>
Cpu(s): 31.7%us, 0.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 65.6%id, 0.1%wa, 0.4%hi, 1.4%si, 0.0%st<br>Mem: 3347068k total, 626036k used, 2721032k free, 0k buffers<br>Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 279740k cached<br>
<br> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND<br> 5240 mythtv 20 0 765m 375m 127m S 121 11.5 87:47.70 mythfrontend<br> 5227 root 20 0 447m 116m 106m S 12 3.6 7:10.36 X<br> 5536 root 20 0 18952 1344 1008 R 0 0.0 0:00.39 top<br>
1 root 20 0 3812 612 520 S 0 0.0 0:00.72 init<br> 2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd<br><snip><br><br>So,
about 30% total usage over 4 'processors'. which should translate to
about 60% of a single processor 230. (This is software decoding, mind
you.)<br>
<br>Once you throw VDPAU into the mix, I have no doubt a 230 will work fine. <br><br><br>Hope that gives a little more detail,<br><br>--PhillW<br></div></div>