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This is arguably tangential, but also arguably relevant: How does hardware video decoding and encoding work? Does the fact that modern processors have on-chip
by exikyut 9y ago
This is arguably tangential, but also arguably relevant:
How does hardware video decoding and encoding work?
Does the fact that modern processors have on-chip GPUs with acceleration mean the instructions are any different?
(Graphics has long been a "???" of mine, but I don't want to get into generalizations in this particular thread. Hardware video {de,en}coding seems mildly relevant though.)
- dooglius 9y agoIntegrated graphics aren't part of any of the actual processors, but rather, the integrated GPU sits alongside the CPUs as one core sits alongside another, and sharing the chip's L3 cache. CPUs communicate with the GPU via a memory-mapped interface, the same way they talk to most devices. The GPU itself does have its own architecture and instruction set, a lot of which are going to deal with specific coding schemes like H.265 rather than the generic sort of instructions you'd find on a CPU.
- mangix 9y agoThere are ASICs on board for that.
- Jasper_ 9y agoHardware decoding has its own module, commonly called "VDEC" in most architectures. It is mostly functionally divorced from the rest of the GPU. GPUs themselves are mostly SIMD vector processors for their "shader cores" with a bunch of custom fixed-function hardware for the more special blocks in the pipeline. This is a completely separate unit from the CPU. There was an attempt from Intel known as "Larabee" to try and build a GPU style pipeline on top of an expanded Intel CPU. The consumer product was canned but the expanded CPU went on to be known as Intel's Xeon Phi line.