Interesting point. However, just to be pedantic, if memory bandwidth were the only bottleneck, you'd expect video decoding to generate output faster than memcpy

Interesting point. However, just to be pedantic, if memory bandwidth were the only bottleneck, you'd expect video decoding to generate output faster than memcpy, since it wouldn't have to read as much :-) My Intel NUC cost me £300 in January and is therefore a fairly low-end machine. It has 307 Gbps of memory bandwidth (2 slots of DDR4-2400). It's surprising how big that number is on a cheap machine today. I'd love to see a profile of where the CPU time goes in a modern CPU-only video decoder. I guess I could get off my arse and do the profiling myself instead of posting this. Anyway, my guess is that the processor speed is the bottleneck, not the memory bandwidth.