[mythtv-users] Dual or Single core Athlon64 for MythTV front-end machine

[David Rees]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 2:20 PM, George Mari
<george_mythusers at mari1938.org> wrote:
> As I understand it, myth does not directly take advantage of multiple cores
> - yet.  I believe this is an evolving feature.

While MythTV itself may not take advantage of multiple CPU cores, that
doesn't mean that your system isn't doing multiple things at the same
time.

For example, when playing video on a frontend (ignoring VDPAU), there
are typically two large CPU using processes - mythfrontend and the X
server.

By having two CPU cores available, the Linux kernel will try to keep
each process running on the same core.  This improves performance and
latency as well as now you don't have two processes fighting for CPU
cache of the same processor.

And in the specific case where the original poster is trying looking
at the single core LE-1640 at 2.6GHz or the dual BE-2350 at 1.9GHz, I
would choose the dual core 9 times out of 10.  However, in this case,
I would suggest the dual core 4850e at 2.5GHz.  You'll basically have
double the CPU power of the LE-1640 for less than $20 more.  Seems
like a no brainer to me!

-Dave