Why are most video editing PCs Intel based?

Did you ever notice that decent professional and semi-professional video editing solutions seem to be all based around PCs with Intel processors? Average to high end home PCs (costing up to £2000/$3500) may be based on either processor and you can do a fair amount of video editing with them even without any dedicated editing card or professional editing software. What if you wanted a low-end capture card or even a low end entry level video editing card in your PC? Your PC manufacturer would probably still be happy to do it for you irrespective of the CPU in the PC. Ask, however, for a professional video editing card, one with support for Betacam/ component inputs & outputs etc., and you'll find that they suddenly go AMD shy! 

It's common belief that AMD is better value so why don't manufacturers of video editing solutions save you some money and build your system around an AMD processor? You are after all spending a fortune on the editing card and software.

Note: We do know that Macs exist but for the purpose of this Intel vs AMD debate we are choosing to ignore Apple :-)

1. Cost of development and testing - why develop for AMD?

Intel has the lion's share of the PC market. It has an even larger share of the video editing market. So if you are developing a new video editing card it's logical to design it with your main market in mind. 

Developing new video editing products is largely a numbers game. You invest a lot of time and money into R & D, you have to get all of that back before you make any profit. Let's say that after several months of hard graft you've designed a new video editing card. It works fine in your labs but it's got to do more than than, it's got to work with the myriad of weird and wonderful products out in the real world. Computer users, damn them, want the choice of using any graphics card, any motherboard and any RAM. They want to be able to upgrade their PC and add more RAM, extra hard disks and the latest optical drives. Your product has to sit easy with all of these other currently available and yet-to-be-released components, interact with them, and work smoothly as part of a team. It's no good if your product causes the graphics card to disrupt colours, talks a language that the motherboard doesn't understand, or causes the PC to freeze. You'll soon be giving out a lot of refunds, and that's not a healthy way to make profits. 

So you need to do some extensive testing in-house (which is an expensive affair). Assume you've got to test and tweak the product to work with both Intel and AMD based systems.  

If Intel has 90% of the market then all the money you invest in testing and developing and ensuring compatibility for the Intel platform will be recouped fairly quickly. It costs a similar amount - or more - to ensure your product's compatibility with the AMD platform but the sales you are going to see are only 1/9th or 11% of the sales in the previous example. You may not even recover the additional R&D costs. Is it actually worth the effort? It's hard to blame manufacturers for taking the easy route out and posting their recommended specs as being "Intel only". 

2. Server Grade Products - Intel is king

When you move up from a PC to a dual processor workstation class or server class machine you are entering an almost AMD free zone. Post-production, professional editors don't use PCs. They use servers, rack-mounted servers, banks of 5U server chassis over 5U server chassis housing all manner of devices from dual and quad processor systems to controls, switches, storage and backup devices all built to fit into the industry standard 19" racks. This type of equipment is core Intel territory. OK, Sun Microsystems build more than the odd server. Then there are the super computers used mainly for research applications... but we digress :-) 

AMD originally built processor for the gamers and the cost conscious customers. That was their core market. That was pretty much their only market. AMD CPUs were fairly cheap offerings and were designed for the home PC. AMD had nothing for the server market till quite recently. Poweroid built the UK's first AMD dual processor system [review] in 2001. It wasn't till late 2003 that AMD launched the Opteron processor, the first AMD CPU that could be used in quad-processor and eight processor systems. In 2004, at the time of writing this article, you still needed to go down the Intel route if you needed any more than 8 processors in your computer.

But who needs so many processors?! You and I don't, but the point here is Intel's dominance of this market. Manufacturers of professional video editing hardware and software have for years been building their products to work with the type of computing equipment that was being used in the industry. 

3. Intel's clout in ensuring compatibility

Intel is very quick to defend it's technology and ensure that cheap components - like cheap unbranded motherboards for Intel CPUs - don't damage their reputation. Motherboard chipsets (not to be confused with CPUs/processor) are crucial to the performance of a motherboard. For a long while Intel guarded this market jealously. They wouldn't allow other players to manufacture chipsets for motherboards that took Intel processors. While you could get motherboards for AMD processors that had AMD, SiS (sic), Via or ALi (sic) chipsets the only motherboards you could get for Intel processors were ones with Intel chipsets on them. For the manufacturer of video editing products this does make life easier in that it has only one chipset to ensure compatibility with. But it wasn't just chipsets. For a while Intel went down the RDRAM (RIMMS) route. This special RAM was the only type of RAM you could use with their boards. This gave Intel a lot more control over the quality and compatibility of the P4 platform. 

By contrast any old RAM worked in AMD based machines. As stated above manufacturers of chipsets for AMD motherboards were a dime a dozen. It wasn't long before there were major problems in the AMD camp. Earlier Via chipset motherboards had problems with USB and most USB devices wouldn't work with them. Several SiS and ALi chipset motherboards had problems with graphics. There were numerous other problems including with mid range video editing cards and software.

Intel ran a tight ship as to what was authorised/licensed for use with their processors. That stability - and reputation for stability - served them well and consolidated their lead in the video editing market (while AMD was making roads in the cheap-but-cheerful and hard-core-gamer markets).

4. System builders not wanting to buck the trend.

Customers assume that everything works with everything else. The experienced PC builder knows that nothing is guaranteed to work with anything else. Video cards may not be compatible with video editing cards. Software patches for the professional video editing program may conflict with the version of DirectX installed with Windows... the list is endless. This may not be so much of a problem if you are looking at the sub £2000 end of the market but as you keep going up in price the potential problems increase exponentially. 

PC manufacturers have a hard enough time with the fast pace of technology change without having to constantly update their knowledge on what is compatible with what and which parts don't like which other parts. When they find combinations that work they stick to them. For an £800 system if the PC builder finds that graphics card "x" doesn't work with motherboard "y" he can - at a push - throw the £12 card away and buy another one that does work. But when you are talking professional graphics cards costing £1,000+, dual Xeon server boards costing similar amounts and a Video Toaster kit costing £4,500 ... suddenly throwing away isn't an option anymore. 

Experienced PC builders will swear that there is a much better chance of everything working smoothly if the machine is Intel based.

5. Technical reasons

Many video CODECs and editing software applications are optimised for Intel processors. This makes a dramatic difference to encoding speeds.

6. Catering for the upgraders - a large part of the market

When developing a new product you do need to test it with legacy hardware i.e. hardware that's been around for a while. A lot of your customers already have PCs/workstations/setups that they have been doing editing on for yonks. They don't want to buy a new PC to use your fancy video editing card on. They'll pay you a thousand dollars for your card but they want to be able to plug it into their existing setup which is almost 100% going to be Intel based. So when you are beta testing your new card with legacy hardware you would test it with legacy Intel based hardware and not bother catering for compatibility with older AMD based machines out in the market.

6. The big players do call the shots

Go to manufacturer's sites, most of them have a detailed list of what they recommend you use their products with. For lower end products they may not be that fussy but with the higher end products the chances are that they will be very specific and very biased towards Intel. In fact many of them will blatantly insist that you use an Intel workstation if you want to get the best out of their product. They go even further: if you go into production level video editing products like Newtek's Toaster or the better Avid program they'll specify an Intel PC from a particular manufacturer (like Fujitsu/Compaq etc) and even specify which model number of that manufacturer's Intel PC/workstation you need to buy.