Quote:
Originally Posted by soresu
A lack of prevalent VP9 HW support didn't stop Google from pushing it for Youtube, and I doubt it will be any different for AV1.
It's also worth noting that for all Qualcomm's market dominance elsewhere, China and India's market will probably be populated with many handsets that use Mediatek SoC's that do support AV1 - and their combined populations/potential market are not something to sniff at for sure.
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VP9 has had hardware support from nearly Day 1 through many different IP vendors along with HEVC as VP9 and HEVC are similar. And it was relatively simple and doesn't cost much in extra die space when HEVC was "the" requirement ( at least at the time ).
All the current hardware decoder including those in Laptops have a much higher power usage allowance, i.e You could have a hardware decoder working in 1+W range without problem. Compare to a mobile phone where it is expected to operate in few hundred mW range. This time around it isn't so simple because VVC has barely finished and on the surface doesn't seems to share that much with AV1. How this translate to hardware decoding block differences remains to be seen, especially when the power requirement is much more stringent. I have previously written this will change with 5nm SoC as both transistor budget and power usage improves, I was referring to TSMC's 5nm, the Sanpdragon 888 based on Samsung 5nm, which has a lower transistor density so it isn't quite there yet.
Finally Mediatek only has one chip that has AV1 decoder. And that is their High End flagship. 90% of Mediatek volume are low to mid range SoC. And transistor budget are even tightener in those segment.
I just wish people are more mindful of different interest in video codec, from hardware to software and from users to producers.