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MillimeterTest Drive: Apple Mac Pro, Part 1
Jun 8, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Table 4. Results for synthetic tests.
Synthetic NLE Tests
While I had Cannaday’s computer, I ran a series of multiple-format benchmark tests that I developed when testing Windows and Mac computers to determine the optimal RAM configuration for Adobe CS4. These tests are obviously synthetic because unlike the previous CS4 and Final Cut Pro tests, these are not real-world projects, but projects I compiled specifically for testing.
I ran two tests with all four formats shown in Table 4 on both computers: one a short project of 2 minutes or less, the other 10 minutes long. The short project involved multiple picture-in-picture effects, including an Adobe After Effects chroma key effect incorporated via Dynamic Link. My goal was to stress system memory and simulate the production of a heavily edited but short project such as a 60-second commercial.
The second round of tests involves 10 minutes of lightly edited source material, including color correction and a logo, but no picture-in-picture or Dynamic Link. This test was designed to assess pure throughput, in essence to see how Nehalem’s increased data bandwidth would perform in the typical event-type production such as concerts, ballets, and sporting events. In all tests, I timed how long it took to render the project to DVD compatible MPEG-2. Table 4 shows the results.
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On one level, these results are pretty impressive, with performance boosts of between 8 percent and 44 percent (3 percent to 39 percent after adjusting for clock speed), essentially realized because you decided to buy a Mac Pro in May 2009 and got the Nehalem-based unit, rather than buying the older-style Xeon in February. Who knew?
On another level, you have to wonder why the Nehalem-based Mac Pro yielded a 79 percent performance boost in my real-world HDV project, but only an 8 percent benefit in the long-form synthetic HDV test. My guess would be that the difference relates to the real-world test being a two-camera project and the synthetic test a single-camera project. Since Cannaday needed her computer back for real work (go figure), I was unable to test this theory.
Even more confusing was the fact that in all four formats, the Nehalem-based Mac proved more beneficial in the shorter project than the longer project, which was the reverse of what I found when running these tests in Windows. After testing in Windows, I had concluded that the features that most directly improve Nehalem’s performance are the integrated memory and Quick Path Interconnect architecture that accelerates data throughput to and from the CPU. That’s because in Windows, Nehalem accelerated performance in the long-form test—which involves lots of data, but relatively little processing—much more than the shorter project. Here, the reverse was true.
What conclusion to draw? At least as it relates to HDV, when synthetic test results collide with real-world test results, go with the latter. Whether short- or long-form, the results in all other formats clearly illustrate the Nehalem-based Mac’s improved performance.
Table 5. More streaming encoding tests.
Other Streaming Encoding Trials
This next series of benchmark tests compares the performance of the new Mac Pro with an older-style 3.2GHz Mac Pro running Mac OS X Leopard with 8GB of RAM. Unlike our first two sets of test, where the Nehalem-based box enjoyed a 5 percent speed advantage, here the Nehalem was about 9 percent behind the faster, but older-style computer.
There’s just one catch: I ran the tests on the older Mac Pro back in December 2008, and then reluctantly returned the computer to Apple. I obviously ran the tests on the new Mac Pro in May and June using the latest releases of the three programs in Table 5. During the interim period, all three programs in Table 5 had minor point releases (e.g. from 3.01 to 3.02), but no major new releases (e.g. from 3.0 to 4.0). That’s why I excluded both Sorenson Media Squeeze and Telestream Episode Pro, which released new versions in the interim that offered both faster performance and improved quality.
So while the results aren’t as perfectly apples-to-apples as I would normally like, the across-the-board performance increase tends to indicate that the Nehalem-based Mac is a rising tide that lifts all boats in the harbor. In particular, Compressor’s H.264 encoding performance with Qmaster enabled was almost scary fast.
What does this add up to? Between the real-world and synthetic tests, it’s clear that the new Mac Pros delivers substantially improved performance over previous Xeon generations. In particular, if you’re a producer of long-form, multiple-camera HD projects, you probably will yield very significant time savings when it comes to rendering and outputting your projects. In streaming-encoding-related chores, those encoding multiple files to multiple targets will yield the most benefit, but all should experience significantly improved performance, even over previous-generation 3.2GHz Mac Pros.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.