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Transcoding in 1/5 the Time with Help from the GPU

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the cycles-are-cycles dept.

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech's Jason Cross got a lead about a technology ATI is developing called Avivo Transcode that will use ATI graphics cards to cut down the time it takes to transcode video by a factor of five. It's part of the general-purpose computation on GPU movement. The Aviva Transcode software can only work with ATI's latest 1000-series GPUs, and the company is working on profiles that will allow, for example, transcoding DVDs for Sony's PSP."

5 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm rarely impressed... by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't get it. ATI is not releasing a new encoder. The test used standard codecs, which do the very same work when assisted by the GPU, only 5X faster.

  2. Re:GPU advantages over CPU? by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Informative

    GPUs are massively parallel DSP engines. That makes them ideally suited for the task. They can do things like "let's multiply 8 different floats in parallel at once". Which is useful when doing transforms like the iDCT or DCT which are capable of taking advantge of the parallelism.

    But don't take that out of context. Ask a GPU to compile the linux kernel [which is possible] and an AMD64 will spank it something nasty. *GENERAL* purpose processors are slower at these very dedicated tasks but at the same time capable of doing quite a bit with reasonable performance.

    By the same token, a custom circuit can compute AES in 11 cycles [1 if pipelined] at 300Mhz which when you scale to 2.2Ghz [for your typical AMD64] amounts to ~80 cycles. AES on the AMD64 takes 260 cycles. But, ask that circuit to compute SHA-1 and it can't. Or ask it render a dialog box, etc...

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  3. lessons of "array processors" from 1980s by peter303 · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the scientific computing world there have been several episodes where someone comes up with a attached processor an order of magnitude faster than a general purpose CPU and try to get the market to use it. Each generation improved the programming interface eventually using some subset of C (now Cg) combined with a preprogrammed routine library.

    All these companies died mainly because the commodity computer makers could pump out new generations about three times faster and eventually catch up. And the general purpose software was always easier to maintain than the special purpose software. Perhaps graphics card software will buck this trend because its a much larger market than specialty scientific computing. The NVIDAS and ATIs can ship new hardware generations as fast as the Intels and AMDs.

  4. Apple's core image by acomj · · Score: 3, Informative

    some of Apple's apis (core video/core image/core audio) use the gpu when it detects a supported card, otherwise it just uses the cpu, seemlessly and without fuss. So this isn't new.

    http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/

  5. Linux Support by Yerase · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's no reason there couldn't be Linux Support. At the IEEE Viz05 Conference there was a nice talk from the guys operating www.gpgpu.org about cross-platform support, and there's a couple of new languages coming out that act as wrappers for Cg/HLSL/OpenGL on both ATI & NVidia, & Windows & Linux... Check out Sh (http://libsh.sourceforge.net/ and Brook (http://brook.sourceforge.net./ Once their algorithm is discovered (Yipee for Reverse engineering), it won't be long.