Processor speed or more cores? Dual Xeon or i7/i9?

[napalm1984]

Hello everybody,

I'm a videographer, motion graphic designer and VFX compositor, i spent some time searching for a good workstation setup to build myself and it's all good except for the CPU... Basically i'm an Ae lover and also a Pr user so those are my main softwares.

My only concern is "in which way" to go big? Many cores (dual Xeon) or high speed (i7 6950x or maybe an i7 7740k).

I've been watching specs from Boxx, HP, Puget, ProMax and others to try better understand which way to go big.

Puget wrote a detailed article on how dual processors are useless for after effects and how Adobe has limited the multithreading, quote: "In fact, the only consistent result we saw was that using dual CPUs for After Effects is not a good idea." (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-After-Effects-CC-2015-3-Multi-Core-Performance-843/...​)

This shocked me because i've been dreaming of HP Z820 and Boxx Apexx5 etc.

But then i thought that probably this could be true because if you build computer and you want to sell to more people you have to consider multiple kind of users, like 3d users for which make more sense having a dual xeon probably. Puget say they do workstation for specific use and that's why for Ae setup the highest processor they sell is the i7 6950x.

Now my questions are:

• Is Adobe going to allow Ae full support for multi-threading sooner or later?
• Should i go with th e i7 6950x or consider single Xeon or even wait for the new processors coming (new i9 and new Xeon family coming soon)?
• Will Premiere instead get enough advantage of two processors to make it worth it? Or for the overall performance is better to go with a sigle high speed processor?

I can't find no more good resources on the web and at this point i really need a voice from Adobe experts showing me the way ❤️

Hope i've been clear, thank you in advance guys!

Love the community

Giulio

[Mylenium]

This has been discussed ad nauseum. Please search the forum. The short and long version of it is, that neitehr AE nor Premiere will ever be able to go beyond a certain level of parallel processing. It's inherent in how at the most rudimentary video works - sequential processing of frames. It doesn't matter if you could run an effect on full throttle on a hundred Xeons or a stack of GPUs as long as you need to decode a video stream or re-encode it which is limited by the CoDec itself, your sorage capacity and speed and a million other factors like audio processing for instance. Conversely, certain internal operations cannot be parallelized for mathematical reasons like linear temporal progression to ensure consistent results. Therefore in the end none of your questions really matter - you could buy a two year old core7i at a bargain price and compared to the most recent version of the same processor you would likely not see any difference in AE. Everything else is speculation. As I said, a lot of this are limitations in the algorithms themselves and whether or not Adobe optimize their apps further and in what ways is something they may not even know themselves. Get whatever you can afford and what makes sense to you. There is really no point in trying to make everything perfect and burn your money on expensive components that will not have any practical benefit.

Mylenium

[MarkWeiss]

I recently started trials with Resovlve 15 and if it was a problem with dual Xeons, I would think I'd get similar results to the Op's.

For us, no version of Premiere was able to play 4K 24P smoothly.

But I've got EIGHT streams of 4K UHD playing smoothly in Resolve 15.

Resolve has a lot of severe limitations that prevent us from using it for anything but Hollywood format cameras (RAW and Prores and DPX) so working with drone footage and consumer camera footage would require transcoding to Prores just to ingest it. And Resolve requires thousands of dollars of hardware just to get full screen 4K preview. They do have Intensity Pro 4K which gives you 3,8K 30 output, but for those that have DCI displays and screening room, it's no use. That and the titler is stuck in 1999--needs to render before playback. But the raw playback performance with LUTs and sharpening applied is unbelievable. EIGHT streams and I still have 50% CPU available. This is definitely a Premiere issue.

[Roei Tzoref]

Is Adobe going to allow Ae full support for multi-threading sooner or later?

that's the foreseeable plan, but don't wait for it.

Should i go with th e i7 6950x or consider single Xeon or even wait for the new processors coming (new i9 and new Xeon family coming soon)?

I'd go with fast processing power, a lot of RAM, SSD's and a decent GPU over multiple cores

Will Premiere instead get enough advantage of two processors to make it worth it? Or for the overall performance is better to go with a sigle high speed processor?

same as previous question.

instead of gazillion cores, buy more RAM - at least 32GB. SSD's with a lot of storage - one for reading, one for writing, one for cache, and a decent GPU - Premiere uses it a lot, and Ae in recent version is starting to render some effects on the GPU.

I can't find no more good resources on the web

this is the most valuble resource I have found for this matter: https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/content_creation/post.php

[Stan Jones]

You have probably found this in searches, but you'll also find many discussions and knowledge users here:

Hardware Forum

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Giulio,

Did you get the hardware info you came for? If you like a certain response, please mark that expert's answer as the correct one. It would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin