CPU Selection for video encoding I have been perusing this page:
https://openbenchmarking.org/showdown/pts/ffmpeg

Something doesn't make sense to me, I am looking at the following CPU's:

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2650L v3 (30M Cache, 1.80 GHz)    
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2690 v3 (30M Cache, 2.60 GHz)     
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2640 v3 (20M Cache, 2.60 GHz)     
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2670 v3 (30M Cache, 2.30 GHz)




According to the benchmarking, the ideal processor is the E5-2640 from that list. I don't see the correlation between the benchmark numbers and the CPU specs, Now the page didn't specify which version of that particular model, so I picked a pretty new one that is almost identical to the newest v4.

I would have assumed that when picking a CPU for video encoding I would be looking the either the:


Highest base frequency
Largest onboard cache
Fastest bus speed


Or some other common metric. What is your experience?
The DV encoder used in the cited test is useless for gauging modern CPUs.

I ran the test command with the referenced media on a 4-core i5 and the difference between -threads 4 and -threads 3 is 0.5% and with -threads 2 is 1%. I see a much larger variance when I use H.264 encoding.

Of course, the bigger flaw is that the command is resizing the video. FFmpeg's internal scaler isn't multi-threaded!