AVC encoding with Cell

[mihakase]

Not sure how credible this is, but...
Cell Broadband Engine is the heart of Sony's video game console PlayStation 3 and sports an impressive parallel power. We've seen proof of this with the new and special PS3 folding@home client. The company Mercury Computer Systems has now presented yet another proof of the power of Cell as it has announced a new HD video encoding engine that is based on the Cell Broadband Engine. According to Mercury, the new engine will offer up to 10 times the encoding performance when compared to current systems when encoding HD material with the AVC/H.264 formats. Mercury is currently working with NTT Advanced Technology Corporation and tuning the software for the system which they hope to be present as a commercial encoding platform at the end of 2007.

(copied verbatim from http://www.nordichardware.com/news,6140.html)

Is any experimentation being done with x264 via linux+ps3?

[akupenguin]

http://blog.cell.sijam.com/cell/017x264/
hope you can read Japanese, beause I don't want to translate that much text.

[giandrea]

http://blog.cell.sijam.com/cell/017x264/
hope you can read Japanese, beause I don't want to translate that much text.

Sounds really interesting. I didn't get much of it because the automatic translation doesn't work very well, anyway I seem to notice that he has just started working on it and there is no real speed up yet (a slow down instead). I hope he keeps up his work.
Can you provide us with some interesting facts he has found, and I didn't get in the translation? Thanks :)

[LoRd_MuldeR]

http://blog.cell.sijam.com/cell/017x264/
hope you can read Japanese, beause I don't want to translate that much text.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.cell.sijam.com%2Fcell%2F017x264%2F&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

:)

[lucassp]

@akupenguin How far are we from GPU support in x264??

[Jay Bee]

For reference I downloaded the sample clip and ran the command line from the blog site.

A64 single core @ 2.5 GHz: 6.45 fps

...

[Jay Bee]

@akupenguin How far are we from GPU support in x264??

I think he said somewhere that it would not be possible to improve encoding performance over modern CPU's.

EDIT: there you go. http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=968217&postcount=5

[akupenguin]

For reference I downloaded the sample clip and ran the command line from the blog site.
A64 single core @ 2.5 GHz: 6.45 fps
Although his commandline doesn't show it, he disabled all asm. My core2 e6600 with --no-asm matched his 2.70fps, while with asm it got 8.92fps.