4 ms·

Could that be in part because newer iPhones perform H264 decoding on the GPU?

• kfarr 6y ago
  IIRC there's usually a dedicated piece of hardware for h264 encoding in most phones now (not the gpu per se)
  • pdxandi 6y ago
    Just realized they were taking about encoding anyway. I’m not sure if that’s usually performed on the same chipset. I don’t know if iPhones have a dedicated chipset for H264, I would be a bit surprised. I could probably look it up later.
    • ksec 6y ago
      > I don’t know if iPhones have a dedicated chipset for H264, Yes it does, both H.264 ( AVC ) and H.265 ( HEVC ). But that doesn't really matter because your ( initial ) point still stands, real time H.264 encoding isn't taxing on an A14 anymore. Remember H.264's work started before 2000 and finalised in 2003. That is like playing Doom 3 on your iPhone. No longer technically taxing by any means even if you are playing it at native resolution. However the industry is well aware of the slow down [1] of Moore's law. The cost increase as well as TDP headroom. So thinking we could continue to throw hardware at the problem simply doesn't work. [1] Moore's Law actually includes a time frame within it, so it would not be wrong to say the law is "dead" considering it has slowed down way beyond its time limit within margin of error. But modern day's media and computer PR tends to use Moore's law as word for transistor improvement.
      • pdxandi 6y ago
        Okay, thanks. Just got a chance to look it up and indeed, beginning with the Apple A9 processor, there are H.264 and H.265 hardware decoders.