The weird thing is, we do have impressing benchmark numbers for both Xeon Gold and Threadripper CPUs. But we also do have two reports now for these CPUs with very low numbers. Strange.

Best is of course first trying to replicate the Sintel benchmarks, using the exact same source and settings, so, not 'any' Sintel file (there are many different versions).

I could suggest a few other things to try that worked at some time on machines with very many cores. With todays versions of DOM, they should not be necessary, but they may give a hint. Also, a full log file could give Carl a hint what to look for.

I have at last proven (in benchmarks) that a 10 year old Xeon 5675 six core is able to 'feed' 40+ encoding threads/cores using the benchmark Sintel. I would be surprised if a modern CPU like a Xeon Gold or Threadripper would perform worse than that.

Sintel and Big Buck Bunny are CGI and will typically compress faster than real world live footage (also Sintel is Scope has fewer pixels to compress than HD/flat). 

But it shouldn't be THAT bad.

- Carsten