intel demos sandy bridge video transcoding engine...

[deadrats]

...and it is FAST!!! (<--- this is supposed to be sarcastic). for those of you that don't remember i recently posted a look at the next generation offerings from both intel and amd and concluded that i thought amd would have the more compelling offering (in fact i predicted that sandy bridge would be intel's next P4). i'm still not sure that i am wrong

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3916/intel-demos-sandy-bridge-shows-off-video-transcode-engine

using cyberlink's media espresso (an application i use on a regular basis) intel showed a sandy bridge processor transcoding a 30 mb/s 1080p roughly 1 minute long source file to an iphone compatible format in under 10 seconds.

basically it looks like sandy bridge's video transcoding engine will make the new processors somewhat comparable to a mid range cuda enabled card, but considering that using my new, energy efficient (i bought a low power version) gts250 and the same espresso application i just transcoded a 31 minute 720p 8 mb/s file to h264 in under 15 minutes, i don't think gpu acceleration has too much to worry about just yet.

[jagabo]

using cyberlink's media espresso (an application i use on a regular basis) intel showed a sandy bridge processor transcoding a 30 mb/s 1080p roughly 1 minute long source file to an iphone compatible format in under 10 seconds.

"iphone compatible format" could be a 32x24 pixel frame. And, as usual, what's the quality? A highly controlled demo by Intel is useless for determining anything.

basically it looks like sandy bridge's video transcoding engine will make the new processors somewhat comparable to a mid range cuda enabled card

Given Intel's track record with all things video it's more likely to be equivalent to a bottom of the barrel Nvidia card.

Oh, and given Intel's software track record, the transcoder won't work when the CPUs are released. It will be another six months or a year before the software is released.

[deadrats]

Oh, and given Intel's software track record, the transcoder won't work when the CPUs are released. It will be another six months or a year before the software is released.

this i'm not so sure about, i recently downloaded the avs video editor demo because they claim that it is now gpu accelerated but when i looked to see about enabling gpu acceleration the only options were for "intel software acceleration" and "intel hardware acceleration".

just for shits and giggles i tried to enable the "intel hardware acceleration" and the software let me tick the option (despite the fact that i use an amd quad core, i guess they haven't implemented any error checking in their software) but there was no effect in rendering times.

i'm wondering if intel has sampled "sandy bridge" to various video editing software developers so that they can hit the ground running and perhaps someone at avs neglected to remove the option in this version of the software.

[poisondeathray]

Intel is being light on the details of the encoder but we saw a demo where Intel took a ~3 minute 1080p 30Mbps source video and transcoded it to a 640 x 360 iPhone video format. The total process took 14 seconds and completed at a rate of roughly 400 frames per second.

If it scaled linearly to frame size, it would be ~ 44fps for 1080p , but it's still early maybe they can optimize something

No mention of quality , of course

What I don't like is having all this silicon , onboard graphics, transcoding silicon , which will increase power consumption, heat, retail prices - for consumers that don't need it. I hope they have SKU's that don't offer those parts.

[jagabo]

Intel is being light on the details of the encoder but we saw a demo where Intel took a ~3 minute 1080p 30Mbps source video and transcoded it to a 640 x 360 iPhone video format. The total process took 14 seconds and completed at a rate of roughly 400 frames per second.

What are you quoting there? I didn't see that in the article deadrats linked to.

[poisondeathray]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/intels-sandy-bridge-architecture-exposed/6

[jagabo]

Thanks for the link. The speed looks good. I always use CRF encoding and wouldn't mind a little increase in file size for a large increase in speed. I have a feeling they just skipped most of the motion search to get their speed though.

[deadrats]

What I don't like is having all this silicon , onboard graphics, transcoding silicon , which will increase power consumption, heat, retail prices - for consumers that don't need it. I hope they have SKU's that don't offer those parts.

amd's bobcat, despite having an integrated gpu (which is dx11 part and features a dedicated uvd) and 2 cores will only have a tdp of 18 watts:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/printnews/AMD-Showcases-Zacate-Processor/5024

that's the processor i'm waiting for, i swapped 3 500 gig hdd's for a single 1.5 terabyte low power western digital e-green that uses 40% less juice than a single "normal" hdd and switched from a 9600 gso to a low power 250gts, the next step is a low power motherboard and one of the new apu's as soon as they hit retail.

according to this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/intels-sandy-bridge-architecture-exposed

it looks like intel will be releasing dual core, quad thread, single integrated gpu parts, sans turbo, that will have tdp's of 65 watts, not bad at all.

[deadrats]

Intel is being light on the details of the encoder but we saw a demo where Intel took a ~3 minute 1080p 30Mbps source video and transcoded it to a 640 x 360 iPhone video format. The total process took 14 seconds and completed at a rate of roughly 400 frames per second.

If it scaled linearly to frame size, it would be ~ 44fps for 1080p , but it's still early maybe they can optimize something

No mention of quality , of course

as soon as i'm done with the transcode i'm doing (1080p vc-1 @ 12 mb/s to 1080p h264 @ 12 mb/s, using badaboom @ 18 fps with my 250 gts) i'm going to rerun the encode with a target resolution similar to intel's test just to have a comparison point.

looking into the video transcoding engine intel is crowing about i am struck by how similar it is to the spurs engine: despite the claim one author made about it being fully programmable, everything i can find says that it is a fixed function unit, with 1 dedicated decode unit each for vc-1, h264 and mpeg-2 and 1 dedicated encode unit each for vc-1, h264 and mpeg-2.

as such it would be mpeg-2/h264/vc-1 hardware codecs, and as a consequence with limited options, thus the quality would most likely be fixed.

i have a feeling intel decided to license the spurs engine, added vc-1 support and hopes it will be enough to hold off nvidia and cuda.