Typically one chip has the hardware for a total encode throughput of like 4k60 pixels per second, optimized for the possibility of one real-time 4k60 encode. Th

Typically one chip has the hardware for a total encode throughput of like 4k60 pixels per second, optimized for the possibility of one real-time 4k60 encode. The chip also includes an entire GPU and/or a bunch of CPU cores. Putting more fixed encode HW instead of GPU or CPU cores is more useful and efficient for YouTube, and at the same time they don’t need individual encodes to be real-time, so it becomes possible to design the hardware for higher quality if you don’t need to guarantee 16ms frame encode times (maybe? at least, "realtime" is the reason I got when asked why hardware can't use recon for intra mode decision...) Intel went partly this way by slapping three 4-core Xeons on a PCIe card (VCA2), abandoned it, then announced variants of Xe to replace it. But ultimately they’re repurposing their existing silicon and it’s not as important for Intel as it is for Youtube.