Cell-Based video encoder

[Trunks9486]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/leadtek-winfast-pxvc1100,2523.html

The hardcore encoders should rejoice.

Takes less than half the time to encode a video compared with the Core i7 920. It also uses about 80w less during encoding when paired with Core i5 750.

Even an Athlon II outperforms the i7 with this little thing with it.

Will OCUK bring this over to this part of the world?

 

[JonJ678]

I think it's been beaten to the punch by cuda, and will suffer from the same limited software support that cuda does at present.

 

[cavemanoc]

Doesn't Badaboom offer something like 10x performance improvement? I know my encoding is considerably quicker using it - and given that huge numbers of people already have nVidia cards in their machines I think they'll have a hard job selling those - kinda like trying to sell a stand-alone physx card now?

 

[Trunks9486]

From what i have read about GPU encoding it suffers in the quality department.

Do you have any articles that benchmark GPU encoding? I sincerely hope that one day GPU encoding becomes as good as software encoding and offer the speed they are promising. From what i have seen so far i was not impressed. And Radeon's GPU encoding is even worse than the CUDA one. Hopefully Open CL will help!

This thread was mainly intended for people that buy expensive high end CPUs for the sake of "encoding".

 

[cavemanoc]

There is a pretty good expo over at AnandTech: image quality is raised as an issue - but hopefully this will be solved as the tech matures and more serious players get into the action.

Obviously the improvement is greater the higher the output spec, but it is a large speed up!

 

[Trunks9486]

Obviously, i am not saying GPU encoding is not good. Hell i would love my GPU to be able to do that as well. Right now though it doesnt.

It would be interesting to see what speed this thing could voerclock to. Given CELL runs in over 3GHz and this only runs at 1.5GHz i would assume that it should overclock really well if they actually allowed you to overclock it. Assuming linear increase then that would give another halving of the time needed!