A large body of encoding software is however, perfectly capable of taking advantage of them.
The comparison is kind of silly.
I disagree. Sure we have things like NVENC for accelerated H.265 encoding but that is an additional hardware expense and means only the machines you have that hardware in benefits. This will literally be all Macs from a $699 Mini and up.
I don't know enough about Intel QuickSync to compare but it clearly isn't used on the iMac in that video for some reason (perhaps the software does not support it? I don't know)
That is pretty exciting for video professionals IMHO.
I'm not saying it is world changing but being able to pick up a MacBook Air for $999 and get performance similar (or maybe better?) than a PC that costs two or three times that with dedicated hardware is very cool.
edit:
I appear to be missing why this is a ridiculous thing to say?
Could somebody please explain to me why the comparison is "silly"?
All modern GPUs already have HW-accelerated encoding, including integrated Intel GPUs, and Nvidia and AMD dedicated ones.
Despite that, HW-encoding is not used that much by video professionals because CPU encoders produce better compression given enough time. You only have to do compression once, while the video will be watched who knows many times, therefore there is no real point in making your encoding faster if the file size goes up.
Your HW encoder is absolutely useless for anything else. It does not make your FX rendering faster, and cannot be used for any other codecs.
Even if say, your HW matches CPU-based encoder at first, it is fixed and cannot be updated unless you buy new HW which takes millions to design. Meanwhile any old dev can contribute to x265 and figure out new psychovisual enhancements that will enhance the quality while minimising the file size.
Specialized HW (i.e. ASICs) has been in existence for decades, yet despite that, there are very good reasons as to why we still use general-purpose CPUs (and GPUs) for most computing applications.
Hardware encoded H.264 and H.265 don't have any visual quality differences when encoded at the same bitrates in the same containers, as far as I'm aware. Could you list a source for this?
Have never heard of any client or production house requesting an encoding method specifically. Although granted I work at the low end of commercial shooting.
The reason these sorts of improvements are possible is because most of the power of a video encoder doesn't come from the container format but rather how effectively the encoder selects data to keep and discard in keeping with that container format. There is also a LOT of tuning that can be done depending on the kind of content that is being encoded, etc.
For high end work basically nobody uses hardware encoders on the final product.
It's the same on these phone chips, sure the encode is much quicker, but it's not a fair comparison because you have much more control over the process using software. We'll have to wait and see how the quality and file size on the M1 encoder stacks up.