Number of Core’s vs CPU Hz Speed. What give fastest and most efficient rendering

[thj]

Dear members,

I am going to build a new ws, and 1.st priority for this is rendering speed and 2nd stability.

Prior to selection of hardware i sit with the following question.
What will give max/ optimum speed and performance while rendering, as many number of cpu core’s as possible or highest possible operation CPU GHz speed. ?

After reading some information and material from different sources i get input that point in both directions. I am more confused now after reading a lot, than before starting to get info about what to select.

I hope members here will find this question interesting and share their experiences with me.

thj

 

[mgb_phys]

Rendering is inheriently parallel - assuming your render package supports multiple CPUs.
Check if the renderer can use any of the graphics card features for rendering, the GPU HW is so much faster than the CPU.

If your package supports it and you have a lot of rendering to do you could actually get best value for money by having many cheap single processor machines networked together, especially if you are running Linux so don't have to pay for a windows licence/machine.

 

[dst]

It depends on more than just CPU speed and number of cores. Number of cores does not scale up exactly proportionally with performance.

CPU frequency is usually the decider but a Pentium 4, say, at 4GHz will still be destroyed by an AMD running at 3GHz or a Core 2 @ 2.6GHz.

 

[EnumaElish]

How does the 3GHz AMD destroy the 4GHz Pentium 4, does it have multiple cores?

 

[chroot]

Clock speed offers only diminishing returns. Processor and software manufacturers are turning to parallelism for the next generation of computing platforms instead.

- Warren

 

[dst]

How does the 3GHz AMD destroy the 4GHz Pentium 4, does it have multiple cores?

The architecture differences but it obviously depends what you want to do. I think that's a bit too far of a comparison (i.e. 3GHz AMD may outperform a 3.5GHz P4). Core for core, those outperformed Pentiums a fair amount. And AMD's sales back then sure said it.

Anyway there are a lot more factors to really say anything without specifics. I mean, AMDs have higher memory bandwidth so they should surely be better for memory intensive tasks (like possibly rendering?).