Quote:
Originally Posted by sneaker_ger
There are some user benchmarks on an iPhone with crazy results.
1080p with 46 to 74 fps. Years ago we told people they would never be able to watch new codecs on a phone if it didn't have ASIC for the codec ... |
Fun way to amaze yourself - figure out how long ago you first got a computer that was more powerful than your current phone (benchmark/metric of your choice). A modern iPhone has lots of fast cores with SIMD instructions and a pretty darn powerful GPU. It would smoke any hot gaming rig of 10 years ago, and a typical laptop of 5 years ago.
Generally each new codec generation aims to be more than twice as complex to decode as the prior generation. With Moore’s Law gains, computing devices get a LOT more than 2x faster in that time.
The bigger challenge with software codecs is getting them integrated into hardware DRM required to play premium content above 480p.
It’s exciting to see these perf gains with AV1. Hopefully we’ll get to a reasonably “done” version of dav1d later this year so we can ballpark decoder requirements for AV1 versus other codecs. I’m particularly interested in how much parallelism is possible. VP9 was nearly single-threaded, which was problematic
A big question for AV1’s viability is how many extra transistors (and thus how much extra die size and SoC cost) full HW decode will take. I’ve not heard any details from anyone who has taped out an implementation yet. Anyone else?