I don't know much about video encoding (I have more familiarity with GPU computing from the neural net side). I would figure out if you are looking for bang fo

I don't know much about video encoding (I have more familiarity with GPU computing from the neural net side). I would figure out if you are looking for bang for the buck with respect to hardware cost or energy cost. The options for video encoding seem to be pure software on CPU or GPU, dedicated hardware on CPU or GPU (such as nvenc or QuickSync), FPGA, or maybe an ASIC if it exists. If using CPU or GPU hardware encoding, I believe you could get better utilization by also running CPU or GPU software encoding at the same time (for GPU, this would involve writing an encoder using CUDA). For FPGA, you might be able license blocks that do encoding, and then fill up the FPGA with these blocks.