[nexuist]

VCUs seem like an excellent solution for this problem and I'm actually surprised they didn't opt to build custom hardware for this earlier on. I wonder if other video companies will hop onto this and start releasing their own VCUs. I imagine this kind of hardware could be very useful for any video streaming site as well as people who edit videos all day (Hollywood etc.)

The article didn't really go into technical details, so would anyone happen to know why a VCU happens to be faster than a traditional GPU? I thought the point of building GPU kernels was supposed to be able to speed up tasks like this (doing the same set of steps over millions of different inputs).

[thu2111]

Hardware encoding is nothing new, is it? Digital TV channels were encoded via hardware VCUs in the MPEG2 era at least. I think all that's new here is the specific capabilities and maybe the tuning for the modern Google specific codecs.