MPEG4-AVC encoding and 8-core

Hi all, I am thinking of upgrading my 3-year old Pentium 4 3.0Ghz to a multi-core processor. Currently, my choices are 1) Intel quad-core QX6700 2) Intel Xeon 'Clovertown' X5355 Quad core X 2 (Two quads on one motherboard. This makes it 8-cores) I am assuming that all encoding software will eventually have suppport for 8-cores, so I am buying for the future and I am leaning toward the 8-core . My questions is whether the 8-core setup will deliver twice the performance of a quad-core processor. Are there any MPEG4-AVC encoding software that can really take advantages of the multi-cores, especially quad-core or 8-cores? Does the x264 distributed encoding farm works on a machine that has multi-cores (e.g. by treating each core as a separate machine)?

Well, I have seen x264.exe provide a boost around 1.7x when using more than 1 thread in an MeGUI encode. Setting this varible from 1 to 2 resulted in a boost of about 1.6x and from 1 to 3 about 1.7x. You can see the data in . Will this xfer to a quad or 2xquad cores with settings like 5 or 6 and 9 or 10? I don't know. I would be interesting to get someone with a QC6700 to try the test encode in that thread I referenced using different thread # values.

thread scaling (1-2-4 cores) has already been discussed in the hardware forum

Scaling links?