Ideal Hardware

[Dekaner]

I have a script that converts RAW images to JPG, resizes, crops and does a copyright text overlay. It is single-threaded and runs on a NUC D54250WYK that also runs a web server, but generally has low usage (meaning that it is not competing for resources, but does hit 100% utilization when the script is run). The NUC has a i5-4250U processor (1.3ghz turbo to 2.6ghz), 16Gb ram, SSD, Ubuntu 16.04, ImageMagick 6.8.9-9. I am using the default Ubuntu packages. The performance is not bad (~7-15s depending on image size).

I'm migrating the web server to a new platform, meaning the script will end up on a dedicated server. One option is to keep the existing NUC and reformat to Ubuntu 18.04. I can either use the default packages (looks to be 6.9.7.4) or I can make/build the latest version, which should also enable OpenCL (though it would just be the built-in Intel HD Graphics 5000 GPU, which may speed things up).

Alternatively, I could purchase a more recent NUC (space is a premium), such as the NUC8i7HVK, which has a i7-8809G (3.1ghz turbo to 4.2ghz). The single thread CPU benchmark rating increases from 1457 to 2357, so I'm thinking my script should run approximately 50-75% faster.

The NUC8i7HVK also has a Radeon RX Vega M GH Graphics (4 GB HBM2), but I'm a bit lost when it comes to OpenCL acceleration. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information beyond which commands are accelerated and I'm not sure if I need something that will run OpenCL 1.x or if I need 2.x.

Thoughts on if it's worth it to try and leverage the embedded GPU on the current NUC? Will I gain any performance increases from going from 6.9.7.4 to 7.0.8-14 on the same hardware? Or should I just bite the bullet with a new box, knowing that even if I can't get OpenCL to work, the CPU will have improved performance?

[bratpit]

Will I gain any performance increases from going from 6.9.7.4 to 7.0.8-14 on the same hardware? Or should I just bite the bullet with a new box, knowing that even if I can't get OpenCL to work, the CPU will have improved performance?

Check performance by time command:

time convert..........

time magick ..............

For me IM 6 is a couple percent faster than IM 7.

Of course for one job OpenCL should be faster but I do not know if its work efficiently .
Instead OpenCL in script for several images to process use

xargs

or better gnu parallel to utilize all cores.
It does the job quickly.