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Originally Posted by Mr_Khyron
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Wow, that's a LOT of RAM for 4K. But if it's somewhat proportional to number of cores, no biggie. Any 112 logical core system is going to have >> 48 GiB RAM. The biggest c5 instance today is 72 logical threads and 144 GiB RAM.
I don't think there's ever been an encoder that could usefully use anything like 112 cores except via GOP-level parallelism. But hey, it's Intel.
I've not been able to find much detailed documentation about the SVT HEVC or AV1 projects. Do they mean "Scalable Video" ala SVC and SHVC with enhancement layers, mainly used in videoconferencing? Or scalable in the sense of scaling with hardware?
Leveraging the new low-level encoder SDK from Intel offers some interesting potential for very fast initial estimates for encoding, leaving the CPU to focus more on refinement. There isn't an AV1 encoder in the current Intel CPUs, obviously, but perhaps some VP9 functionality added in Kaby/Coffee Lake can be leveraged. Certainly things like weighted prediction and coarse motion vectors could be reused to some degree. SVT HEVC has a full 8-bit HEVC encoder implementation to leverage in Skylake-S+ and 10-bit in Kaby/Coffee.
Unfortunately there aren't any Xeon processors with VP9 encoding yet. The best available is the 8/16 core i9-9900K. I don't see any public roadmap for when AV1 might be added. Ice Lake? I see that has an all new HEVC encoder at least. Although given tape-out schedules and how recent the AV1 bitstream was finalized, a full fixed-function implementation might not be there before Tiger Lake. (all just personal speculation fueled by Wikipedia).
I am very curious to see what comes out of the next generation of GPU-assisted software-defined encoding. Having it all on-die instead avoid the PCI bus latency challenges of past GPU+CPU implementations.