Last year in a blog post on video encoding for the iPod Nano, I complained about the lack of performance on my old Athlon. A bit later, I noted that (obviously) video encoding is a good example of an application that can take advantage of parallelism. Yesterday I put these two topics together in a practical test. And it worked nicely enough.
My new Core i7 920-based machine was very well utilized by the Nero 8 suite’s Nero Recode 3 application when converting some children’s movies for use on my Nano. Here is a screenshot of the CPU load at one point in the computation:
It was much higher than this at times, but capturing that using the snipping tool was harder than expected.