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Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

Yes, currently there is no hardware encoder/decoder for AV1, but there is for h264 on many processors. This may change in the future if companies and users adopt it.

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I might be mistaken, but I believe most high quality encodes in both h264 / hevc are not done using dedicated hardware encoders built into processors or graphics cards. While it's much faster there's usually some quality tradeoff. Instead, I believe that newer processors have additional instruction sets that enable much faster software encoding on the same codecs. Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.

You're right, there are fewer h264 encoders than decoders in consumer software, but still dozens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC_products_and_... There are precisely 0 for AV1 so far (except some may have a subset of the standard in FPGA by now).

> Yes, currently there is no hardware encoder/decoder for AV1, but there is for h264 on many processors. This may change in the future if companies and users adopt it.

Does x86/x64 have any? What's the name of one of the instructions (for example)? I feel like mostly all I see is just bigger vector instructions...

It's not a collection of x86_64 instructions, it's an separate specialized core on Intel CPUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardwar... and AMD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine You need OS-dependent driver code to access it. Otherwise, if a decoder just uses x86_64 instructions, it's a software decoder.

Whoa!!! So there's a CPU, a GPU, and a dedicated video decoder?? I had no idea. Thanks for sharing this!!

Yeah, its called a VPU aka Video Processing Unit. If your hardware implements video decoding, they likely have licensed or designed their own VPU IP block.

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