Encode-Off!

Occasionally (read: always) there is something nerdy going on in the dev/creative department. Sometimes it's uber nerdy, like rattling off the meaning of some obscure acronym like CMOS (fyi it's Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, hellllllooooooo??). This past weekend involved an 80% nerdy and 100% friendly competition between Frankie and me to see whose computer could encode the same movie faster using Handbrake. Which movie, you ask? Never you mind, but just be assured that it involved a lot of codec-challenging motion and a little bit of 80's cheese.

The reason this competition was interesting is that it was between my ultra modern home built Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor overclocked to 4.15ghz at a 520mhz FSB versus Frankie's slightly aging Mac containing dual Intel Xeon 5030 processors at 2.66ghz and a 333mhz FSB. That pits two very fast and slightly more efficient cores versus four slower, less efficient cores. To give you an idea, it's sort of like comparing the impact of a lightweight car travelling at 100mph versus a heavier car travelling at 65mph. It really had the entire office biting their nails, let me tell you... Yeah, no one in the office even knew about this aside from our department.

When the dust settled Frankie came out on top but only by about 15 minutes. All things considered I think my little car did just fine. And had we competed in something more single threaded like calculating millions of digits of Pi, oh baby. Now if you'll excuse me, I have like thirty million hot women to date that are hot to know what BIOS stands for.