The Beast continues to amaze.
I've never really thought about it before but here is cpu utilisation while playing 'Freak on a Leash' by Korn in iTunes:
This is the windows task manager. Points to note:
- two cpu cores so two cpus displayed
- neither is working very hard: 0%. The little spikes are where the track started. While running it normally shows 0% with the occasional 1% glitch.
I've never tried this on a lesser pc. Thinking about it now, a pair of 2.4Ghz cpu's should have no trouble generating a pair of 44kHz audio signals: simplistically, that's 54545 clock cycles for each 44kHz cycle. Decoding mp4 files is probably more challenging than shifting the contents of a wav file to a dac but 54545 clock cycles seems like plenty to play with.
Peter's Moblog
