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Edit Expertise: Test Drive: HP xw8400

Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

New dual-core Xeons in a dual-proc configuration.

When testing multiple-processor computers, the phrase to remember is, “A woman can have a baby in nine months, but nine women can't have a baby in one month.” Sometimes, it makes no difference how many resources you throw at a job — if it can't be split efficiently, the extra resources just don't matter.

This highlights the potential benefits of buying a workstation such as the dual-processor HP xw8400 reviewed here. Our dual-processor test unit would retail around $5,500 (or a little more than $4,000 for a single-processor unit), compared to about $2,599 for an Intel Core 2 Duo-based workstation such as the xw4400 reviewed in our October issue (see digitalcontentproducer.com/desktoppost/depth/
test_drive_hp). The xw4400 came with the E6700 2.67GHz dual-core Core 2 Duo processor, while the new xw8400 included two 5160 3GHz dual-core Xeon processors.

In the past three issues, we've looked at the new Intel chips and what they bring to real-world workstations. In October, we observed that the Core 2 Duo chip had seriously changed the performance debate. The HP xw4400 was significantly faster than the workstation it replaces — the HP xw4300 — as well as last-gen workstations from Dell and Boxx. Last month, we found similar results in Dell's implementation of the Intel Core 2 Extreme in the Precision 390, which significantly outperformed last-gen workstations from HP and Boxx, as well as Dell's own Precision 670, running on dual Xeon chips (see digitalcontentproducer.com/videoedsys/revfeat/
test_drive_dell).

But what now of Xeon? Most people know the Core 2 chips replace Intel's Pentium designations, but it should be understood that much of the same technology that has given Core 2 its buzz has also lifted the current generation of Xeon chips. The 5100 series dual-core Xeons (you may have heard them called “Woodcrest”) have now been implemented into multiprocessor workstations, offering serious high-end performance — one example being the dual-proc/dual-core HP xw8400. (As we go to press, the wave of new releases continues as the new 5300 series quad-core Xeon chips hit the market the same day as the new HP xw8400 ultra-high-end workstation that incorporates them.)

Beneath the surface, the Core 2 Duo and the new Xeon are very similar, with the Xeon featuring a faster front-side bus (1,333MHz compared to 1,066MHz). In theory, the xw8400 should be more than twice as fast as the xw4400 because the xw8400 has two processors, each about 10 percent faster than the Core 2 Duo (3GHz compared to 2.67GHz).

The real question is: How much faster do your applications render if you spend $5,500 for a dual Xeon system vs. $2,500 for a single-processor Core 2 Duo? Your answer: It depends.

In our tests, the xw8400 proved more than twice as fast as the xw4400 in some trials, but slower in others. The obvious difference was how efficiently each application was able to split the tasks and allocate them to the four available processors. Going in, it's impossible to tell if the tasks can't be effectively split between multiple resources, or if the code was simply not yet totally optimized for the new Intel processors. To some extent, the measure of the multiprocessor workstations will be determined by your workflow — whether you are working in a render-intensive environment or a demanding multitasking environment.

Before getting to our benchmarks, let's meet the xw8400. Our system ran Windows XP32 SP2 with 4GB of RAM, with graphics driven by the Nvidia FX 1500 card. Our boot drive was an 80GB SATA rotating at 7200rpm, with a 15K 74GB SAS drive for video data.

Our first tests involved benchmarks run previously on a number of computers. Adobe Premiere Pro rendering tests involved a standard incorporating chroma key, slow and fast motion, color correction, image stabilization, titles, brightness and contrast adjustments, still-image pan and zoom, logo overlay and rotation, and audio mixing. The first test measures how long it took to render these effects to a DV file, while the second measured rendering into MPEG-2 format. Table 1 shows the results. We've included the older Dell Precision 670 (now no longer available) just to show the progression of the new Xeon chips over the older Xeon chips.

Let's focus on MPEG-2 rendering performance. Here, buying the xw8400 rather than the xw4400 would reduce encoding time by about 19 percent — far short of the theoretical 50 percent we were seeking — although both the xw4400 and xw8400 outperformed the other workstations tested. During my tests, a quick glance at the Performance tab of Windows Task Manager revealed why.

The Performance tab shows the use of each logical processor in the computer, and because the xw8400 has two dual-core Xeons, there were four processors shown. However, they were only running at about 36 percent overall use.

If you checked the Performance monitor on the xw4400, you would see only two processors (representing each “core” of the dual-core E6700), but total use of about 60 percent. Because the xw4400 was 66 percent more efficient with two processors than the xw8400 with four processors, the performance difference between the two was only 19 percent.

In Sorenson Squeeze encoding trials (Table 1), we saw similar results. The xw8400 was only 5 percent faster than the xw4400, and Windows Task Manager showed only 22 percent overall CPU usage on the xw8400's four processors during encoding. Clearly, buying an xw8400 simply to accelerate Sorenson Squeeze would be an unwise investment.

Photoshop trials

Next were the Adobe Photoshop trials, shown in Table 2. Here, working with small images showed an improvement of about 12 percent over the xw4400, which is disappointing but logical given that working with small images is more input/output intensive than processor intensive, as evidenced by the relatively short processing times. Once we started working with larger images, the xw8400 really started to shine.

For example, in our longest and most computer-intensive task, applying the remove noise filter, the xw8400 was more than twice as fast as the xw4400. Processor use during this task was 97 percent. In this particular test, Photoshop was a model of efficiency, nearly realizing the complete potential of the xw8400. Overall, if you're working with large images in Photoshop, and frequently have to wait for tasks to render, the xw8400 could be a huge timesaver.

Forging new ground

Because many producers are moving to high-definition video formats, and would be logical targets for a dual-processor computer, we converted the DV content in our standard tests to HDV and produced an MPEG-2 file. The xw8400 outperformed the xw4400 by only 3 percent. Next, we created a five-HDV-stream picture-in-picture project on both computers, and again rendered to MPEG-2. Here, the xw8400 proved about 19 percent faster than the xw440 — still less than we had hoped.

Finally, we imported the single-stream HDV test project into Adobe After Effects, and rendered that file into QuickTime H.263 format, while rendering the multicam test to MPEG-2 in Adobe Premiere Pro. This improved the overall processor use on the xw8400 to about 51 percent, and boosted the performance advantage of the xw8400 to about 24 percent over the xw4400 — the best we had seen in a video-related application at that point.

Changing gears, we requested a copy of Autodesk 3ds Max8. Programs such as 3ds Max are among the most processor-intensive applications on the market, and large-film producers often create render farms comprised of multiple workstations to speed the rendering task. We reasoned that if any program would be streamlined for multiprocessor use, it would be one such as 3ds Max. We turned out to be right, at least in part.

To run the tests in 3ds Max, we loaded and rendered four files from the 3ds Max install disc to identical parameters on the xw4400 and xw8400. We chose our test files to try to exercise different features in 3ds Max, including the Radiosity engine (radiosity.max), camera effects (MotionBlur and DragonFlying.max), inverse kinematics (abis-fall-splineIK.max), and particle flow (heli_rotorwash.max). The results are shown in Table 3.

Essentially, on more complex scenes with sophisticated lighting and textures, the xw8400 cut rendering time by as much as 50 percent. Processor utilization was again 97 percent, proving that at these tasks (here rendering radiosity.max), 3ds Max is wonderfully efficient.

On the other hand, in tasks involving simpler, more animation-oriented functions, the advantage waned and ultimately disappeared on the abis-fall-splineIK.max, which rendered more quickly on the xw4400, though only marginally so. Clearly, it appeared, the more advanced the scene, the greater the load on the processor and the better opportunity for the xw8400 to shine.

After this experience, we started adding more complex effects to our test project in After Effects, such as multiple moving lights, 3D cameras, and motion blur, which pushed the xw8400's overall use to more than 85 percent during rendering. Generally, at least with After Effects, it seems that as project complexity increases, so do the benefits of having a multiple-processor system.

Given that Premiere Pro was the cornerstone application for our testing to date, we spoke with Giles Baker, Premiere Pro's senior product manager. Baker noted that the current release of Premiere Pro was developed before the new Intel processor was available, so it wasn't completely optimized for workstations such as the xw8400. “For the next release, Premiere Pro will detect the Core 2 Duo architecture and use a separate, optimized code path to perform many tasks,” Baker says. “In addition, many of these tasks will be able to use more threads, allowing us to take better advantage of multiple processors. We're looking forward to repeating these tests with our next release.”

In the long term, you can expect that all companies that sell rendering-intensive programs will take this same approach, which makes a dual-processor xw8400 a great long-term investment for digital content producers — especially those upgrading from pre-Core 2 Duo Pentium or older Xeon architectures. On the other hand, if you're expecting a new dual-processor system to cut your rendering time in half, you may be disappointed in the short term.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.