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Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode – Linux Support Lands

99 points by gardaani 6y ago

Sebb767 6y ago
It's going to be highly interesting whether Intel can compete in this market. GPUs are quite hard and, compared CPUs, haven't stagnated much.
- hddherman 6y ago
  We have definitely moved on from the stagnation era of CPU development, if the advancements of AMD are anything to go by.
  - esgwpl 6y ago
    Not to take away from their success but their recent progress have been more like them catching up to Intel. It will be interesting to see if they can truly pull ahead though.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      Intel is already behind judging by core count in every segment. You can't buy 16-core consumer Intel CPU, you can't buy 64-core workstation or server Intel CPU.
      - pedrocr 6y ago
        Or an 8-core laptop CPU. AMD has a win across the board right now.
        johncalvinyoung 6y ago
        Intel does have 8-core i9 laptop CPUs in the H bracket (45W). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i9-processors/i9-9880h.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/... released Q2'19. What they don't have a SKU for quite yet is a 8C16T U-class (15W) part like the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U. https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-4800u https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-4800u
        pedrocr 6y ago
        I stand corrected. I only shop for laptops with the U class parts.
        johncalvinyoung 6y ago
        Entirely fair. My usage is on the other end--I wouldn't be familiar with the 15W offerings if I hadn't been tracking Ryzen mobile development or shopping for a new machine for my father.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        selectodude 6y ago
        https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/05/apple-introduces-first-8-core-macbook-pro-the-fastest-mac-notebook-ever/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/05/apple-introduces-firs... Hm?
    - hddherman 6y ago
      Depends on how you look at it, with pure horsepower they have passed Intel in performance already, seeing how they can just put 64 cores on a CPU. The single thread gap has also been closing rapidly, and with Zen 3 on the horizon they could pass Intel in this segment, too, especially since Intel has been delaying 10nm forever.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Except most devs don't have any idea of what to do with them, and they end up mostly managing OS processes, containers, GC and JIT background processing, VM instances.
        pedrocr 6y ago
        Maybe for 64 that's true but for mainstream usage getting 8 cores in a laptop instead of 4 is a massive gain. That's effectively what has happened in the current laptop lines with AMD having twice the cores with the same power usage and single-thread performance. Here's the comparison of the top-spec AMD and Intel CPUs available in the just released T14s: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-4750U/3738vs3740 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-... If your workload is running a single-app that may be underused but particularly in home-office mode I'm constantly doing VCs, having 4 or 5 browser tabs that are heavy, Office for documents, etc. It doesn't matter if all those are a single thread, I'd be filling up the 8 cores and probably taking advantage of the 16 threads from SMT as well.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Except mainstream usage is mostly about Core i3 and i5 laptops, yes even for coding. Those are the typical units that externs get from customers' IT, when it isn't some kind of cloud based VM. And regular consumers don't even know what they own, rather what the guy at the store or some relative has given as advice.
        pedrocr 6y ago
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      Well, Threadripper 3990X CPU beats Xeon Platinum 8280 by a large margin. I can't imagine choosing the latter over the former for any reason, really.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hydroreadsstuff 6y ago
  If you factor out chip size and clock frequency, they do actually stagnate. They add new features, but legacy rendering performance is improved by single-digit percentage points, I believe. If you look at A100 compared to V100 for e.g. FP32 FMA performance (not tensor). 14.1TFLOPS -> 19.5 = +38%, for 2x transistors (16->7nm), +35% SMs and 250W->400W is not that great. Note that NVIDIA uses boost clock for all A100 numbers and seems not have published any base clock so far. So their is a chance that actual sustained A100 performance is lower. Turing GPUs have rather large dies. TU102 754nm vs GP102 471nm. So comparing them as is, isn't quite fair. On the CPU front Intel used to use rather small dies for consumers (and even use die shrinks to just cram more chips onto a waver -> more $$$), but now that AMD forces their hand, they are giving in. But of course a lot this area goes into extra cores, not single threaded performance (diminishing returns there).
  - derefr 6y ago
    > legacy rendering performance is improved by single-digit percentage points, I believe. I feel like one would expect this, given that the rendering engines of any given generation, are architected under specific assumptions about the optimal relative "shape" of their graphics pipeline. The clearest example being old game consoles. You could write a SNES emulator for the SuperFX coprocessor, that used the host's GPU to render the polygons, but the rendering would not go any faster than it does on the SNES, because the draw commands are just being trickled out as the physics-engine work necessary to update their positions gets done in fits and starts per scan-line. That trickling-out was necessary on a SNES, because there wasn't time to run all that logic during VBLANK; but in the modern era, we have the opposite problem — that the logic could all be completed during VBLANK (with tons of room to spare), but instead is being "dragged out" across 512 HBLANKs, such that the GPU only gets the full picture of the completed scene at the last moment. (Despite the recent source-code leak, rewriting StarFox to make it render at 60FPS or more will not be a trivial process.) The same thing is true, to a varying extent, of all legacy renderers. They're written for graphical pipelines that just don't match the one we have now. The one we have now is "wider" — more parallel — in so many places, but if it's just being used to recapitulate a long, serial set of fixed-function legacy pipeline stages, that width doesn't help it any.
  - 6y ago
- tagrun 6y ago
  Video encoding/decoding circuitry (which the post is about) is not a part of the GPU, so that's a bit tangential.
ksec 6y ago
Well the title would be more accurate as GPGPU Accelerated Decode. It gives the false assumption that AV1 is being Hardware Accelerated in Intel Xe GPU which often means dedicated decoding block to decode the video codec in lowest energy usage possible.
- tagrun 6y ago
  That's not GPGPU/compute though and Gen 12+ does have hardware accelerated decoding for AV1: https://github.com/intel/media-driver/blob/master/README.md#decodingencoding-features https://github.com/intel/media-driver/blob/master/README.md#... "AV1 hardware decoding is supported from Gen12+ platforms."
- fulafel 6y ago
  "With some 33k lines of new code, hardware AV1 decode acceleration is in place for Intel Gen12 graphics" - that would be some tight GPU code! GPGPU implementation of AV1 would be a useful thing though. Anyone know of implementations?

99 points by gardaani 6y ago

It's going to be highly interesting whether Intel can compete in this market. GPUs are quite hard and, compared CPUs, haven't stagnated much.

hddherman 6y ago
We have definitely moved on from the stagnation era of CPU development, if the advancements of AMD are anything to go by.
- esgwpl 6y ago
  Not to take away from their success but their recent progress have been more like them catching up to Intel. It will be interesting to see if they can truly pull ahead though.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Intel is already behind judging by core count in every segment. You can't buy 16-core consumer Intel CPU, you can't buy 64-core workstation or server Intel CPU.
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      Or an 8-core laptop CPU. AMD has a win across the board right now.
      - johncalvinyoung 6y ago
        Intel does have 8-core i9 laptop CPUs in the H bracket (45W). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i9-processors/i9-9880h.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/... released Q2'19. What they don't have a SKU for quite yet is a 8C16T U-class (15W) part like the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U. https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-4800u https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-4800u
        pedrocr 6y ago
        I stand corrected. I only shop for laptops with the U class parts.
        johncalvinyoung 6y ago
        Entirely fair. My usage is on the other end--I wouldn't be familiar with the 15W offerings if I hadn't been tracking Ryzen mobile development or shopping for a new machine for my father.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - selectodude 6y ago
        https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/05/apple-introduces-first-8-core-macbook-pro-the-fastest-mac-notebook-ever/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/05/apple-introduces-firs... Hm?
  - hddherman 6y ago
    Depends on how you look at it, with pure horsepower they have passed Intel in performance already, seeing how they can just put 64 cores on a CPU. The single thread gap has also been closing rapidly, and with Zen 3 on the horizon they could pass Intel in this segment, too, especially since Intel has been delaying 10nm forever.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Except most devs don't have any idea of what to do with them, and they end up mostly managing OS processes, containers, GC and JIT background processing, VM instances.
      - pedrocr 6y ago
        Maybe for 64 that's true but for mainstream usage getting 8 cores in a laptop instead of 4 is a massive gain. That's effectively what has happened in the current laptop lines with AMD having twice the cores with the same power usage and single-thread performance. Here's the comparison of the top-spec AMD and Intel CPUs available in the just released T14s: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-4750U/3738vs3740 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-... If your workload is running a single-app that may be underused but particularly in home-office mode I'm constantly doing VCs, having 4 or 5 browser tabs that are heavy, Office for documents, etc. It doesn't matter if all those are a single thread, I'd be filling up the 8 cores and probably taking advantage of the 16 threads from SMT as well.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Except mainstream usage is mostly about Core i3 and i5 laptops, yes even for coding. Those are the typical units that externs get from customers' IT, when it isn't some kind of cloud based VM. And regular consumers don't even know what they own, rather what the guy at the store or some relative has given as advice.
        pedrocr 6y ago
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    Well, Threadripper 3990X CPU beats Xeon Platinum 8280 by a large margin. I can't imagine choosing the latter over the former for any reason, really.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hydroreadsstuff 6y ago
If you factor out chip size and clock frequency, they do actually stagnate. They add new features, but legacy rendering performance is improved by single-digit percentage points, I believe. If you look at A100 compared to V100 for e.g. FP32 FMA performance (not tensor). 14.1TFLOPS -> 19.5 = +38%, for 2x transistors (16->7nm), +35% SMs and 250W->400W is not that great. Note that NVIDIA uses boost clock for all A100 numbers and seems not have published any base clock so far. So their is a chance that actual sustained A100 performance is lower. Turing GPUs have rather large dies. TU102 754nm vs GP102 471nm. So comparing them as is, isn't quite fair. On the CPU front Intel used to use rather small dies for consumers (and even use die shrinks to just cram more chips onto a waver -> more $$$), but now that AMD forces their hand, they are giving in. But of course a lot this area goes into extra cores, not single threaded performance (diminishing returns there).
- derefr 6y ago
  > legacy rendering performance is improved by single-digit percentage points, I believe. I feel like one would expect this, given that the rendering engines of any given generation, are architected under specific assumptions about the optimal relative "shape" of their graphics pipeline. The clearest example being old game consoles. You could write a SNES emulator for the SuperFX coprocessor, that used the host's GPU to render the polygons, but the rendering would not go any faster than it does on the SNES, because the draw commands are just being trickled out as the physics-engine work necessary to update their positions gets done in fits and starts per scan-line. That trickling-out was necessary on a SNES, because there wasn't time to run all that logic during VBLANK; but in the modern era, we have the opposite problem — that the logic could all be completed during VBLANK (with tons of room to spare), but instead is being "dragged out" across 512 HBLANKs, such that the GPU only gets the full picture of the completed scene at the last moment. (Despite the recent source-code leak, rewriting StarFox to make it render at 60FPS or more will not be a trivial process.) The same thing is true, to a varying extent, of all legacy renderers. They're written for graphical pipelines that just don't match the one we have now. The one we have now is "wider" — more parallel — in so many places, but if it's just being used to recapitulate a long, serial set of fixed-function legacy pipeline stages, that width doesn't help it any.
- 6y ago
tagrun 6y ago
Video encoding/decoding circuitry (which the post is about) is not a part of the GPU, so that's a bit tangential.

ksec 6y ago

Well the title would be more accurate as GPGPU Accelerated Decode. It gives the false assumption that AV1 is being Hardware Accelerated in Intel Xe GPU which often means dedicated decoding block to decode the video codec in lowest energy usage possible.

tagrun 6y ago
That's not GPGPU/compute though and Gen 12+ does have hardware accelerated decoding for AV1: https://github.com/intel/media-driver/blob/master/README.md#decodingencoding-features https://github.com/intel/media-driver/blob/master/README.md#... "AV1 hardware decoding is supported from Gen12+ platforms."
fulafel 6y ago
"With some 33k lines of new code, hardware AV1 decode acceleration is in place for Intel Gen12 graphics" - that would be some tight GPU code! GPGPU implementation of AV1 would be a useful thing though. Anyone know of implementations?