[mythtv-users] ffmpeg and multiple CPUs. Was: Should I be switching to 0.21?

[David Brodbeck]

lemongecko at gmail.com wrote:
> Telling ffmpeg you have one CPU was the right choice. We do a lot of
> FEA analysis at work, and we did plenty of benchmarking on HT CPUs
> when they came out. We saw results similar to yours, though completely
> disabling HT in the BIOS *improved* our performance.
>   
That's been my experience as well.  In one case I had a system that was 
acting as a VPN gateway on a gigabit network.  Throughput went up 
significantly when I turned HT off in the BIOS.  I also turn it off on  
machines in our high-performance computing cluster.

The fact that more recent Intel CPUs don't seem to support this feature 
makes me suspect it was something of a boondoggle all around.  Intel 
seems to have given up on it and just moved to putting two or four whole 
CPUs on one chip.