Benchmarking the HP Z840 Workstation for Video, Part 3: Analysis

HTT or Not?

What about whether to enable HTT? Table 5 (below) shows the times for all tests with HTT enabled (on the right) and disabled (on the left). The colors compare the two scores, with the faster scores in green, and the slowest scores in yellow.

Table 5. Performance differences with HTT disabled (on the left) and enabled. Click the image to see it at full size.

In most cases, performance was faster with HTT disabled, particularly with the second test, though the difference wasn’t substantial. This is shown in Table 6 (below), where negative numbers show instances where HTT slowed encoding.

Table 6. Comparisons of tests with and without HTT enabled. Negative numbers indicate that performance was faster with HTT disabled.

The worst case scenario was running the MSU VQMT from the Turbo SSD drive, where HTT produced a performance hit of 12%. Looking at CPU utilization charts like Figure 2 seemed to show why; with HTT enabled and 40 cores available, CPU utilization hovered around 40%. With HTT disabled and only 20 cores available, utilization ranged from 50%-80%. With CPU cores, as in life, sometimes less is more. On the other hand, HTT accelerated performance beyond the 20% threshold for a green background in three of four FFMPEG trials.

Next time I have a project that involves significant file analysis, I’ll buy an SSD drive for my Z800, and make sure I’m running with HTT enabled. With a system like the Z840, if you’re running from an SSD drive, as you obviously should be, running with HTT disabled could deliver slightly faster results.

It should go without saying that each analysis tool has its own unique performance characteristics, and results will vary. Clearly SSD drives are worth a try for virtually any disk-intensive analysis task, and it’s also worth checking the performance with HTT enabled and disabled.

So, here are the key analysis-related takeaways:

• • A balanced system like the Z840 should dramatically accelerate analysis tasks involving reading and writing large data sets and significant analysis.
• • Using an SSD drive as a source drive is essential to harvest the performance increase.
• • While enabling HTT doesn’t always deliver the fastest possible performance, the difference was minimal in my tests, though performance with and without HTT is definitely worth checking.