In the meantime, the 6 core Broadwell-E I7-6850K has seen a big price drop - down from $650 to $480 on several sites. It's still expensive compared to the Kaby Lake I7-7700K, but if you wanted two more cores then it's now a much more reasonable option. People seem to have very good results overclocking it, too.
Edit: Having just seen that the i7-7800X is priced at $389, I'm thinking the I7-6850K is still overpriced, unless you need 40 PCI-E lanes.
I looked into this and was going to buy a Ryzen or wait for the Threadripper for a huge multicore video transcoding server we run, in an attempt to source parts for an upgrade for our last-gen i7 platform. Unfortunately Ryzen's performance in ffmpeg is dismal, relating to its poor AVX performance, it seems.
I've seen comments on their platform being "poor" due to software not tuning for the platform specifically, which is definitely possible. But unfortunately I can't bank on that for now, so we had to stay with Intel for our batch transcoding processes. Still very excited to monitor this product line; it's been a long time coming.
That Phoronix FFmpeg test clearly measures 2 - 4 threaded speed only, so Intel's fast quad core CPUs shine there. The test description is "H.264 HD to NTSC DV" where the main bottleneck is slow H.264 decoding (CABAC decoding is somewhat difficult to parallelize).
You should look for x264 (H.264/AVC encoding) or x265 (H.265/HEVC encoding) tests. HandBrake is often used as a frontend for these, so the test may be named Handbrake H.264 HQ encoding or something like that.
x265 benefits a bit more from Intel's faster AVX instructions, but Ryzen (or Threadripper/Epyc) is still a very valid choice for high quality HEVC encoding. The GPU alternative would be Intel Skylake's GPU-accelerated encoder through Media Server Studio, which has scored well in MSU's test: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/
As for H.264 encoding, there are no GPU encoders that could approach x264 quality.
Great post. I can tell you my benchmarks using GPUs and various platforms didn't favor x264 encoding, as you also noted.
>x265 (H.265/HEVC encoding)
Not something our services can reasonably support or use currently, so even if true, Ryzen/Threadripper is still probably not something we can go with.
I look forward to switching in 2-3 years when we re-visit this conversation, or adopting it for other services soon. I'm very excited for AMD's competition and fully willing to switch; I just haven't seen the evidence that supports that it would be a good idea for our particular use case.
Please also note that there is a new x264 version that supports AVX512 in nightly as of a few weeks ago.
It may not have made it down the pipe to everyone's package managers yet but it's out there and should improve performance on Skylake-X and related Xeons.
Curious - why are you doing video transcoding on CPUs?
The CPU to GPU speedup is so massive that it's really not worth it. I don't recall the exact numbers, but I got an order of magnitude boost going from HEVC encoding on CPU to GPU with no noticeable quality difference. Works out to several times more efficient too FPS/watt wise.
As I understand it, video encoding continues to perform worse on GPUs. Hardware H.264 video encoding is comparable in quality and speed to the x264 "ultrafast" preset, with the only benefit being lower power consumption. More importantly, hardware encoding is incapable of producing higher-quality output, comparable to software encoders' higher presets.
It actually looks quite good in my experience. Definitely better than the "ultrafast" preset on CPU encoding.
I use CRF though mostly for GPU encoding which should remedy the issue at the possible cost of file size (didn't seem to be a significant increase, but was a slight one).
I'm also talking HEVC and not H.264 though primarily - and using NVENC not a CUDA based encoder as your link mentions. I've also seen it mentioned that things have improved a lot on the newer GPUs, so might be worth a try again if you've got a 10xx card around.
>The CPU to GPU speedup is so massive that it's really not worth it.
Not in my experience. Furthermore, there are a lot of errors (comparatively) that are introduced when GPUs are used at high speeds. Other comments have linked articles indicating why this can be the case.
Edit: Having just seen that the i7-7800X is priced at $389, I'm thinking the I7-6850K is still overpriced, unless you need 40 PCI-E lanes.