| That's not why next-generation codecs keep being made. I remember back in 90s / 00s when a CPU would stutter doing MPEG2 decode with XVID or DIVX codecs. Eventually, CPUs got faster, and guess what? Faster CPUs mean you can "afford" better compression / decompression routines. No one uses XVID or DIVX anymore, because CPUs are so fast that we want better compression (not faster compression). H264 was then popularized, and I remember in the late 00s / early 10s when "Netbooks" would stutter decoding H264. ASIC chips were invented to better decode H264. But guess what? Today, CPUs / GPUs are so much faster that H264 is now too easy, and we desire even better compression. Repeat the story again for H265 and VP9, the next generation (with VP9 patent-free becoming more popular). AV1 is designed to be the next step. Its still too slow for most people, but ASICs are being developed so that cell-phones can run the AV1 decoder algorithm. Eventually, computers will overall get much faster, and everyone can then move to AV1. ----------- Eventually, computers will be so fast that even AV1 is "too quick", and a new, slower, better form of compression will be invented. We move to newer codecs because our technology continues to change. Now maybe AV1 will be the "end all, be all" of codecs, but it will be a sad day if that is true. Because for codec-progress to end implies that CPUs have stopped improving. Moore's law seems to be dying, and later nodes (5nm, 3nm, etc. etc.) are taking longer and longer to research-and-develop. Maybe our computers will stop improving soon... |
Besides, most of the processing burden is on encoding. CPU performance hasn't resulted in better codecs, but rather advances in encoding methods. AV1 encode is 100x slower than previous codecs, but that's fine due to the savings at scale.