Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Dumb question, is this not a readily available IP block that you can buy? Better yet, why haven't industry partners licensed royalty-free IP for this?
There are also likely opportunities for additional efficiencies when you make a custom {en,de}coder for your system. I suspect (but haven't confirmed) that the typical Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Apple multi-function media engine isn't just a collection of completely independent encoder/decoder blocks for each codec but a kind of simplified specialized microcoded CPU with a collection of fixed-function blocks which can be shared between different codecs. So it could have blocks that do RGB->YUV conversion, Discrete Cosine Transforms, etc. and you can use the same DCT block for AV1, HEVC, and AVC. Maybe you can also create specialized efficient ways to transfer frames back and forth with the GPU, for sharing cache with the GPU, etc.