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How much silicon does it take to add an AV1 decoder to a chip? The areas Apple highlighted in their A17 release looked pretty substantial, but I wasnt sure if it was to scale. https://b3148424.smushcdn.com/3148424/wp-content/uploads/202...
The die area is very modest, but the hard part is building it in the first place.
Encoding is more area, but should still be peanuts for Apple SoCs.
According to the article, it's supported by every browser except Edge. It will be interesting to see who ultimately ends up making a better IE, Safari or Microsoft. So far, it seems Safari is winning, given the ever growing set of standards they don't support, but maybe this is Edge trying to catch up?
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Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and other ARM chipmakers for phones, TVs, streaming sticks and such were quicker to pick it up.
Is it really _that_ hard to create a generic video decoding DSP whose firmware could be updated? Most codecs are very similar to each other. IIRC Texas Instruments used multicore DSP to decode MPEG back in the 90s. Or maybe we should have written codecs to be amenable towards GPU shader implementation...
Is AV1 better than HEVC? Or is it about the same, just freely licensed?
HEVC isn't widely supported by web browsers: https://caniuse.com/hevc AV1 is supported by almost all web browsers: https://caniuse.com/av1
Is it really _that_ hard to create a generic video decoding DSP whose firmware could be updated? Most codecs are very similar to each other. IIRC Texas Instruments used multicore DSP to decode MPEG back in the 90s. Or maybe we should have written codecs to be amenable towards GPU shader implementation...
I wonder if encode could run on the iGPU? I think, at least, that one of the biggest use-cases for encode is game streamers (is this right?), they should have decent dGPUs anyway, so their iGPU is just sitting there.
Intel used to write hybrid encoders (that used some fixed function and some iGPU shader) for their older iGPUs.
So the answer is yes... if you can fund the right group. But video encoders are hard. The kind of crack developer teams that can pull this off don't grow on trees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That looks like a pure marketing slide to me. I don't think it would make sense to actually have separate dedicated silicon for these.
It is a pure marketing slide. The M3 variants floorplans don't look anything like that, as can be seen on other pictures of the dies. That being said, it's pretty common to have dedicated silicon for video codecs. It normally takes the form of a little DSP with custom instructions to accelerate operations specific to the codec.
I'm guessing this is a distinct region of the chip and not integrated with CPU/GPU since they scale up by replicating those blocks and wouldn't want to redundantly place that hardware. Having it separate also allows a team to work on it independently.
I think the relative size of the media engines is accurate in that slide, so then it comes down to how large the ProRes parts are in other chips. They are probably a couple of the unlabeled regions next to the performance cores in the M1 Pro die shot below, but I don't know which.
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17019/M1PRO.jpg Taken from: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the "ever growing set of standards" that Safari doesn't support?
This was discussed here not too long ago. I assume not much has changed since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31902707
What you see is that they implement different features with Google obviously wanting the browser to be a full blown OS. So they added things like MIDI support and web pages being able to access the battery.
The problem with many of those features is that they have been shown by researchers to either (a) be insecure or (b) allow web pages to uniquely fingerprint your device. This is obviously an anathema to everything Apple believes in.
[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+121,edge+118,safari+17.2...
How much silicon does it take to add an AV1 decoder to a chip? The areas Apple highlighted in their A17 release looked pretty substantial, but I wasnt sure if it was to scale. https://b3148424.smushcdn.com/3148424/wp-content/uploads/202...
> How much silicon does it take to add an AV1 decoder to a chip? The die area is very modest, but the hard part is building it in the first place. Encoding is more area, but should still be peanuts for Apple SoCs.
Is AV1 better than HEVC? Or is it about the same, just freely licensed?
HEVC isn't widely supported by web browsers: https://caniuse.com/hevc AV1 is supported by almost all web browsers: https://caniuse.com/av1
And iOS Safari is arguably the most important browser at all since iPhones are disproportionally used amongst video content creators.
