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YouTube Designed Its Own Video Transcoding Hardware
- ddingus 5y agoExpect this kind of thing to continue. Peak performance comes from dedicated hardware. Almost always has. Maybe always, but someone here may have a better answer. Dedicated hardware has a couple very solid advantages: Once designed and performing, it will continue performing very efficiently. It's possible to get real time, high performance and very reasonable power budgets all at the same time. Integration with software can be clean, robust and efficient. For software as a service, assuming the chips never leave the family, it's great insulation against IP theft and competition, who must generally hire or replicate the work done to gain advantage for themselves. Downsides: Revisions are brutal, unless the design and protocols are very forward looking. Older revision hardware can be bolstered with software, until it all reaches a point where software alone may perform better. For a long time, barriers to entry were insane. The FPGA has grown to a point where very powerful designs can be prototyped and performant at modest clock speeds. Barriers are dropping and the need for differentiation ever increasing these days.
- truth_seeker 5y agoI really want FPGAs(and dev tools) to succeed. With proper commitment, FPGA can really shine in designing efficient ML algorithms, Database engines, networking stack, cryptography etc. I have seen enormous potential building up in FPGA development tools in last few years, they have reduced the complexity of development and release cycle time significantly but not quite close to Java/JS/Go/Python/others. Time to market is still dominant factor over elegant and efficient software design.