Video Coding Performance [chapter]

Shahriar Akramullah
2014 Digital Video Concepts, Methods, and Metrics  
During the period between the 1980s to early 2000s, desktop PCs were the main computing platforms, with separate components such as the CPU, chipset, and discrete graphics cards. In this period, integrated graphics was at its infancy starting with the Intel (R) 810 (TM) chipset, mainly targeting the low-cost market segment, and power consumption was not typically a concern. CPU speed was the overarching differentiator between one generation of platforms and the next. Consequently, when the
more » ... -architecture of a CPU was being designed, one of the key questions was how to achieve higher performance. The traditional way to achieve that was to keep increasing the clock speed. However, growth in transistor speed had been approaching its physical limits, and this implied that the processor clock speed could not continue to increase. In the past few years, the maximum CPU speeds for desktops and tablets began to plateau and are now ranging between 3-3.5 and 1.5-2 GHz, respectively. With the advent of platforms with smaller form factors, keeping the processor frequency limited has become the new norm, while focus has shifted toward lowering the system power consumption and toward more efficient utilization of available system resources. Digital video applications require huge amounts of processing. Additionally, real-time processing and playback requirements mandate certain capabilities and performance levels from the system. Only a couple of decades ago, real-time video encoding was possible only by using high-performance, special-purpose hardware or massively parallel computing on general-purpose processors, primarily in noncommercial academic solutions. Both hardware and software needed careful performance optimization and tuning at the system and application level to achieve reasonable quality in real-time video. However, with the tremendous improvement in processor speed and system resource utilization in recent years, encoding speed at higher orders of magnitude, with even better quality, can be achieved with today's processors.
doi:10.1007/978-1-4302-6713-3_5 fatcat:yqk2febiszgchavs2rqgs5vspi