bit-tech News: Intel believes that video encoding belongs on the CPU

[news 28]

Hi all,

 

After speaking to several Intel executives during Computex, we learned

that Intel believes video encoding belongs on the CPU and always should

- we found its reasoning to be rather bizarre and full of holes, so

here's our take on things. If you could post a link on your site that

would be very much appreciated.

 

*Link:*

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/04/intel-says-video-encoding-belongs-on-the-cpu/1

 

 

 

*Quote:

*/""//When you're encoding on the CPU, the quality will be higher

because we're determining which parts of the scene need higher bit-rates

applying to them," said François Piednoel, senior performance analyst at

Intel.

 

Piednoel claimed that the CUDA video encoder will likely deliver poor

quality video encodes because it uses a brute force method of splitting

the scene up and treating each pixel the same. It's interesting that

Intel is taking this route, because one thing Nvidia //hasn't really

talked about so far is video quality.

 

"/ /The science of video encoding is about making smarter use of the

bits and not brute force," added Piednoel.

 

I asked Piednoel what will happen when Larrabee turns up because that

is, after all, a massively parallel processor. I thought it'd be

interesting to see if Intel would change its tune in the future once it

had something that had the raw processing power to deliver similar

application performance to what is being claimed with CUDA. Intel said

that comparing this to a GPU is impossible, because the GPU doesn't have

full x86 cores. With CUDA, you can only code programs in C and C++,

while x86 allows the developer to choose whatever programming language

they prefer -- that's obviously a massive boon to anyone that doesn't

code in C."/

*

 

*Cheers guys!

 

Tim Smalley

www.bit-tech.net