Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Maximizing CS5.5 Performance With Intel Xeon Processors]
[Karl Soule - Adobe Systems] Hi there. Today we're going to be talking
a little bit about how to go through and configure out your workstation
for maximum performance.
With a workstation-class system, you have the ability to have more memory in the system,
better CPU horsepower,
better configurations of hard drives,
so if you're a creative professional, you definitely want to be using
a workstation-class system.
Today we're actually using an Hewlett-Packard Z800 workstation.
This is a very high-end, professional workstation with Intel Xeon Processors.
This actually has dual processors and we'll be talking about how many cores
we actually get to work with and the benefits involved in that,
but one of the things that you can run into when you're configuring a system
is it's very easy to maybe spend a little bit too much in one area of the system
and then not enough in another, and you can end up with an unbalanced system.
With a workstation, it's actually very easy to make sure
that you have a complete, balanced system, and I'm going to show you a couple of tips
and tricks on how you can go through and just optimize your system
and make sure that you have the best possible performance with your workstation.
So to get started, I want to talk a little bit about all the different components
that exist inside of a workstation system, and to demonstrate this,
I'm actually going to bring up a tool within Windows.
I'm just going to right-click on My Computer
and go to Properties,
and there's actually a system built into Windows--this has been going on
for several versions back now--
where Windows will actually build a rating of the system.
This is called the the Windows Experience Index,
and you'll see here, right now my system is rated at a 5.9.
Now, this is kind of an interesting scale.
The way this is designed, you don't actually have a maximum number in the system,
so as computers evolve and get more powerful, that number will actually go up
so this is a way that you can actually compare a workstation for maybe 3 or 4 years ago
to what you have today because this Windows Experience Index,
the number will actually go up as your overall processing power goes up.
But it's actually kind of easy to get into a situation
where maybe you don't quite have the balance in your system
or you're not getting the full benefit of all of the different pieces of your system.
So I've clicked on the Windows Experience Index to actually break down this number
into different categories here, so you can see my processor
actually has a much higher score, my RAM is actually very fast
and matched to the processor, graphics are looking really good.
These are all in the same range, but you'll notice here that my primary hard disk
has a lower number than the rest of these.
This actually shows that maybe I might want to look at improving
the performance of my primary hard disk and maybe something like Intel SSD,
Solid State Drive technology, might be a good fit in there to help kind of maximize
the overall throughput in the system, and again, provide this a balanced workflow
within the system so that all the components are running at roughly the same level.
If you don't do this, it's kind of like having a car
where maybe the engine is really, really powerful,
but the transmission can't get that power out to the wheels.
That's the same type of thing that you can run into with a workstation,
and so these numbers actually provide a fairly simple and easy way to quickly compare
what's going on inside your system.
Now, I want to break down the processor here a little bit further.
When you're dealing with applications CS5.5 Production Premium,
applications like Adobe Premiere Pro can utilize all of the different processors
in the system and will actually kind of break processes apart
to use as many processors as you have
and use them all equally.
So we can check that and we can actually look at this
and see how the processors in this system are set up.
I'll just open up the Windows Task Manager.
Now, this system is using Intel Xeon 5660 Processors.
It actually has two physical processors in the system
and each of those processors have 6 cores,
so we have 12 physical cores inside of this system
and as you can see here on the graph, we actually are showing
more than 12 cores listed here, and that's because we've also turned on
a special Intel technology called Hyper-Threading.
Hyper-Threading actually allows one core to look like two cores in the system.
It doesn't quite behave and give you as much performance as actually having 2 cores,
but it does provide an increase in performance of 10 to 20 percent
and it actually shows in the system that you'll have even more cores.
So this system has 12 physical cores, but Hyper-Threading turned on,
Windows actually sees and experiences 24 cores in the system.
And again, Production Premium can take full advantage of having this many cores
in the system, so it's definitely worth having a workstation-class system
with this many cores provided by Intel Xeon chips.
So one key factor when you're dealing with this many cores
in the system is you want to make sure that you have enough RAM
so that each of the cores has enough room to play around.
Each of these processors--each of these CPU cores--is going to be writing calculations
out to RAM and you want to make sure that every CPU core
has enough RAM to be able to move information back and forth effectively.
One rule of thumb that I typically like to follow:
we'll forget about Hyper-Threading for a minute.
If you remember, this system has dual Intel Xeon 5600 Processors.
That provides 12 physical cores in the system
and so we want to make sure that each of those cores has roughly 1 GB of RAM
to play around in.
So a minimum RAM configuration for a system with this many processors,
I would probably put it at 12 GB of RAM as the bare minimum.
That's going to ensure that every CPU core
has that scratchpad where it can go through and it can actually read and write
information as each core is doing complex calculations.
Let's go in and look at this system again, really quickly here.
I'll go back and bring up the system properties through My Computer
and you can see there's where we can see we have 12 GB of RAM.
Now, one way I could probably fine-tune the system and get even more performance
is actually double that amount.
2 GB of RAM per core is actually a nice sweet spot
when we talk about price versus performance.
Each CPU core can actually take advantage of 2 GB of RAM very effectively
and so that might be another area that I could boost a little bit more performance
out of this system if I so desired.
But 12 GB is nothing to sneeze at--that's actually quite a bit to work with.
Some times or areas where I might increase the amount of RAM in the system,
if I'm a very heavy user of R3D media, the 4K Raw media,
that can be a real reason to boost the amount of RAM in the system
because each of the cores is doing all of these calculations
as far as DeBayering the footage, doing the color correction or taking the Raw material
and actually decoding it and applying different color filters to those pixels.
And so R3D media in particular is very CPU-intensive to decode
and again, those cores need the RAM to operate,
so 2 GB per core is a good medium.
So when you're thinking about the type of processors that you're putting in the system,
it's never a good idea to just stock up and load the system up with CPU cores
and not have the RAM to back that up.
The two kind of have to work together.
So the last area we want to talk about are graphics cards,
and I'm actually going to bring up Premiere Pro here
and we'll go ahead and close the Task Manager on the screen here.
When we're working with graphics cards, the graphics card can actually do
two different functions when you're doing editing inside of Premiere Pro.
The first area that the graphics card drives is it drives the source monitor
and the program monitor, so the actual display of the video in the windows
is driven by the graphics card.
So if I have video footage loaded up in either of these monitors--
here I've got like a visual effects shot of some water
or I can load up a different piece with some different audio and video here--
this actual display of the pixels in this window are driven by the video card.
The same thing with this program monitor, and that's all a function of--
a lot of different graphics cards can support this, even basic, integrated graphics chip sets
can support this functionality, so this is not something to worry about too much.
An area that you can really benefit from moving to a discrete graphics card in the system,
something like an Nvidia Quadro Series card,
Premiere Pro itself actually has the ability to offload
some of the special effects; things like color correction,
blur effects, things that you might be using in the timeline actually offload that
over to the graphics card.
These effects that I brought up on the screen here--
these are actually all GPU accelerated effects--if you don't have an Nvidia Graphics Card,
these are going to take up some of the CPU cycles and so you're going to see
all those cores in the system actually start to rise as you begin to add those effects
to clips on your timeline.
But if you're using an Nvidia Quadro Graphics Card,
you'll actually see these effects will run over on that separate GPU
and so it won't increase your CPU usage,
which means you have more room for having different formats,
being able to decode all different types of video files on the timeline
without having to transcode or rewrap the files into a different format.
So that's kind of where you have both the CPU and the GPU working together
and again, finding that balance and harmony where all the different pieces of your computer
are matched so that you get the maximum throughput through the system.
So there's one configuration within Premiere Pro that you want to be aware of.
This is actually found throughout a lot of the applications in Production Premium.
It's in the Media Encoder, it's in After Effects, Premiere Pro and Encore.
I'm going to go to Edit and choose Preferences,
and if I come down to the memory panel here,
you'll notice that the system actually has a shared RAM pool here
where After Effects, Premiere Pro, and the Media Encoder
all share a particular pool of RAM and there's an ability here to actually reserve RAM
for other applications.
Now, right now I have this kind of split 50/50 where I have the Production Premium apps
using 6 GB and I've got 6 GB reserved for other apps.
This might be a valid configuration if I'm going through and I'm using
a very RAM-intensive application that's outside of Production Premium.
A lot of people use like a 3-D animation application such as CINEMA 4D
or 3-D Studio Max, so this might be a valid configuration for if I'm running that
at the same time I'm running these applications.
But otherwise, I probably want to bump up the amount of RAM that's shared
between these applications.
Photoshop--for what most video professionals are using Photoshop for
doesn't require a huge amount of RAM.
Something like 2 or 3 GB reserved for applications like Photoshop should be fine,
so I'll just go ahead and bring this down so that we're serving 3 GB
and now I've got 9 GB to play with between the Production Premium apps.
That's just one other way that you can kind of fine-tune and tweak the system
to get better performance.
So I hope this video you've kind of learned a little bit more about what it means
to have a workstation-class system
where we've got all the different pieces and components
within the system working together in harmony, providing a balanced system.
We've got better throughput in the motherboard; we can put tons of RAM
in a workstation-class system, and having great, fast processors
with multiple cores like the Intel Xeon class Processors;
like today, using the 5660 Processors, again, it provides that overall experience
where I can be more creative, I can work faster than with any standard desktop system.
Thanks again for watching.
[ADOBE TV Productions]
