News Google Replaces Millions of Intel's CPUs With Its Own Homegrown SoCs

[Admin]

Google's VCUs can be 33x more efficient than Intel's CPUs in video encoding.

Google Replaces Millions of Intel's CPUs With Its Own Homegrown SoCs : Read more

 

[Co BIY]

These kind of single company efficiencies will make market entry for competitors increasingly difficult .

It's easy to hate on intel but at least they'll sell to anyone.

The tech is amazing though. What process node and foundry are these being made on?

 

[jkflipflop98]

I'm sure they'll also be peddling these things to Netflix, Hulu, Disney, yada yada yada. Smart idea, if they can beat Intel. Good luck.

 

[watzupken]

That's why Intel's woes are getting worst over time. The sector which they historically makes a lot of money is eroding from them very quickly. That pain is starting to surface in their latest earnings where revenue from data centers fell off a cliff when everyone else is seeing a healthy bump in revenue/ profit. We will see in future earnings whether its truly a case of the industry still trying to digest the inventory or is there a bigger problem that is starting to show up on their P/L.

 

[TerryLaze]

For many years Intel's video decoding/encoding engines that come built into its CPUs have dominated the market both because they offered leading-edge performance and capabilities and because they were easy to use. But custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) tend to outperform general-purpose hardware because they are designed for one workload only. As such, Google turned to developing its own specialized hardware for video processing tasks for YouTube, and to great effect.

Isn't qsv an ASIC as well?! The issue for google is that it is connected to a CPU and that's probably why it's less efficient. (draws more power)

 

[excalibur1814]

Cool! Now every video on youtube will have THREE adverts.

 

[Friesiansam]

Cool! Now every video on youtube will have THREE adverts.

Use a good adblocker. I see no adverts on YouTube.

 

[ottonis]

What about encoding quality? Being a digital video editing hobbyist myself, for maximum quality output software encoding has ususally been preferred over hardware accelerated encoding (e.g. NVENC). The obvious trade-off was obviously speed.
Have the most recent iterations of hardware encoders improved that much that they are on par or better than software based video encoding?

And is it true that the incredible performance of M1 chips in video encoding/decoding tasks is due to some implemented sophisticated hardware accelerators in the iGPU?

 

[evdjj3j]

Isn't qsv an ASIC as well?! The issue for google is that it is connected to a CPU and that's probably why it's less efficient. (draws more power)

I was thinking the same thing.

 

[JayNor]

while the transcoding is one operation, the SVP/GM of Intel's IOTG group this week talked about their main focus is on doing ai inference on multiple camera streams ... ai at the edge. So, I think Intel will find more use cases for its GPUs.

FPGA based SmartNICs are also being promoted for fixed operation streaming.

 

[artk2219]

Use a good adblocker. I see no adverts on YouTube.

Seriously. Youtube is damned near unwatchable without an ad blocker now.

 

[TerryLaze]

What about encoding quality? Being a digital video editing hobbyist myself, for maximum quality output software encoding has ususally been preferred over hardware accelerated encoding (e.g. NVENC). The obvious trade-off was obviously speed.
Have the most recent iterations of hardware encoders improved that much that they are on par or better than software based video encoding?

And is it true that the incredible performance of M1 chips in video encoding/decoding tasks is due to some implemented sophisticated hardware accelerators in the iGPU?

Quality isn't a problem if that where the case you couldn't watch a single movie since every player is being hardware accelerated.
All the articles about quality use a ridiculously low bitrate to show a difference but if you use a decent enough bitrate the quality will be just as good.

 

[Gomez Addams]

These kind of single company efficiencies will make market entry for competitors increasingly difficult .

It's easy to hate on intel but at least they'll sell to anyone.

SO WHAT? Why should Google sell this to anyone else? They certainly are not obligated to and if you want to hate them for that then adulthood must be quite a challenge for you.



<Moderator Warning: Personal attacks will not be tolerated here. Keep it up and sanctions will follow closely>

 

[Co BIY]

Why the insults Gomez ?

Not hating on anyone but I do have concerns that a world with only one viable source for search/video platforming might not have as much freedom of information as I want. YouTube is already pretty heavy handed in suppressing content.

 

[TerryLaze]

SO WHAT? Why should Google sell this to anyone else? They certainly are not obligated to and if you want to hate them for that then adulthood must be quite a challenge for you.

As the article says google just took readily available modules and put them together in the configuration that suits them the best, they don't have to sell them to anybody else because anybody can make the same configuration.

 

[Don Frenser]

Another financial blow to Intel.

Amazon is working the same angle.