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I kind of thought the big orgs were mostly using hardware encoders now.

AMD Xilinx's Alveo lineup is basically just for this and I think the energy efficiency is way higher, incredibly parallelizable workloads. ASICs would be even better.

YouTube transcodes from their reference copy on ASICs, "Argos" (maybe onto a new thing by now). There's a paper on this too. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...

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I don't think efficiency and speed matter for Netflix like it does for YouTube since there's only a fraction of the content. Software encoding will always be better and more flexible.

The AMD Alveo ASIC isn't actually available to buy yet. Their older Alveo FPGA (formerly NGCodec) is available but is not competitive by any metric apart from marketing noise.

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