Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just received a patent that grants the company the rights to GPU-accelerated video encoding, which may be the primary technology that takes advantage of the horsepower of the GPU in today's consumer applications. The broad patent covers tasks to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU, and output of data to the CPU."
The patent was filed in 2004, and there must be loads of prior art. Companies such as Nvidia and ATI have had GPU-accelerated video encoders for years now.
Regardless, this patent should never have been granted. It's all because of the patent office's massive backlog, and their decision to accept every random patent to reduce it.
I can PERSONALLY prove prior art on this patent.
I have custom code from a project back in 1997-1998 for a Chromatic Research MPACT video card that used it to offload either MPEG-1 or H.263 video encoding process to the card.
I also have code from the same era that offloads both H.263 and/or MPEG-1 encoding to a video card that is based around a combination of a Trident 9xx series video chip and an 8x8 VCP.
So, I can PROVE I have WORKING code that does what this patent is for that was written in 1998 or earlier.
In fact, this is a math coprocessor revisited. Remember those?
Yes, those chips that handled floating-point operations so well that they eventually were integrated directly onto the CPU die itself; ie- 80386 CPU + 387 co-processor evolved into a single 486DX with integrated FPU.
Still, I don't see the why you're comparing them to GPUs... FPUs were small in comparison, even compared to early fixed-function rasterizers from the 90s; today GPUs are multi-billion-transistor chips with hundreds of programmable stream processors (with faster/higher bandwidth memory) that not only cover all of the rendering pipeline, but can do general-purpose computation as well. While small GPUs are getting integrated into future CPUs (AMD Fusion, Intel Sandy Bridge, etc), I'm doubtful discrete graphics will disappear in the way x86 math-coprocessors did, at least for the foreseeable future.
Sigs are for losers
That's why I'm an advocate of an adversarial patent system, something kinda like this:
You (as a private individual or a company) can sign up to be a "patent examiner", for a minor fee. You specify which areas in which you have expertise (and you (or your employees) may need certain certifications as specified by professional groups in that area, depending). When a patent is submitted, it is required that the patent clearly and specifically state what problem the covered art solves - e.g, in this case, it would be something like "efficiently encoding video using components found in a commodity computer".
Then, a few examiners are picked at random. They're given a day or so in isolation, with whatever reference materials they want to bring (no networked devices, though) to figure out how they would solve the problem. At the end of their isolation, they just need to produce a couple of sketches of how they would go about solving the problem.
If a majority of the examiners (who should be experts in the field of the patent) produce any solution sketches that are largely similar to the patent, the patent is rejected - because clearly, if when experts in the field set their minds to solving that problem they come up with the to-be-patented invention, then it's not novel; it's just an obvious evolution no one else has gotten around to doing yet.
It specifically says GPU, dont sell them as GPU's anymore. Lets call them MFPU's, multi-function processing units (or some other use of the letters MF).
No, but providing someone with a unit to calculate (for example) a transformation doesn't mean that you give them an efficient way of computing FFTs. Of course if you give them a general purpose matrix-vector multiplier then it does. In 2004 a graphics card used a fixed function unit, and today it uses a general purpose one. Assumptions about how obvious it is that other applications can be performed don't carry back to previous generations of the hardware.
I do believe that you are arguing in good faith and that you are not a troll, and I understand your argument. Here are the things which I believe were obvious (to general practitioners in the field) in the 1990s:
1. Video display and video (de)compression are essentially large linear algebra problems which lend themselves to vector processing.
2. Video display hardware will continue to improve.
3. Eventually video display hardware will become sufficiently powerful to perform video (de)compression.
The reason I believe that those were all obvious to practitioners in the field in the 1990s is because they were obvious to me in the 1990s and I wasn't even a specialist in the field. (I was, however, working on large number-crunchy stuff). I would suspect that the true experts in those fields were well aware of all three of the above points even in the 1980s.
I'll have to end my participation in this thread, now, and get back to real work...