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

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."

Comments

Re:GPU advantages over CPU?

[tomstdenis]

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