[Robotica]

Next generation of hardware will be mostly dual or quad core SoC's. Will xbmc perform better on a higher clocked dual core or lower clocked quad?

To know the better purchase between both at similar prices, I wonder how multi threaded XBMC is?

I see (also thanks to the Rpi) a few CPU bound places where quadcore might be useful:
1) CPU decoding using ffmpeg > not activated, only hi10p.
2) populating listings in gui > ?
3) media scrapping > ?
4) buffering
5> RAW files decoding

(In regard to the CPU, I don't know anything about addons, PVR, deinterlacing and subtitles)

Any other, extra, better info to make my next HTPC purchase decision? I'm planning on using an x86 chip although arguments should be more or less similar for ARM hardware.

[Dougie Fresh]

Looking at the Passmark benchmarks for E1-1200 vs A6-5200, so far I'd say the E1-1200 isn't much of an improvement over an E-350 or the like. The A6-5200 scores up where Celeron/Pentium desktops do which we know work very well for HTPC. Therefore, I'll be going with the quad-core SoCs until the dual-core show me something better.

[Robotica]

Looking at the Passmark benchmarks for E1-1200 vs A6-5200, so far I'd say the E1-1200 isn't much of an improvement over an E-350 or the like. The A6-5200 scores up where Celeron/Pentium desktops do which we know work very well for HTPC. Therefore, I'll be going with the quad-core SoCs until the dual-core show me something better.

HTPC's with those new chips can have lower clockcount (Mhz) with a similar experience. So in terms of CPU/GPU power, the HTPC sweetspot can have less Mhz. I already know my preffered sweetspot.

But now, both Intel and AMD, are providing similar priced & similar TDP dual and quad chips around my personal HTPC sweetspot.

So my question is, which one would be the better for XBMC usage? I think, besides usage and hardware platform, this depends on how well XBMC handles parellized workloads (aka multithreaded), for example on the features I mentioned. As far as I understand, XBMC is highly threaded nowadays but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what the smarter choice would be. Hence my question ;-)

ps.
I know last week some patches where committed (specifically database queries optimization for library views and smartplaylists) to improve on some specific CPU bound processes.

[Dougie Fresh]

I plan to position the Intel SoC as a HTPC-only solution and the AMD SoC as a HTPC/gaming solution.