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by xiphias2 1558 days ago
Couldn’t they reuse the tensor cores that are shipped in every device at this point? There are already lots of papers on compressing images using deep learning, I don’t see any reason why the companies couldn’t make a video standard that relies on that hardware.
1 comments

having a hardware encoder and decoder on a device is super useful for streaming content of that device. Not sure I would want to use other compute for that, that compute is much better used doing CV on the video stream :)
Why do you think so? Those tensor processors are actually already optimized for video processing: all of the complex postprocessing in the iPhone camera app is done by the tensor cores inside the M1 chip. I wouldn't be suprised if it would already far be able outperform the mentioned codecs, but of course it needs lots of software development that can only be done by the big companies.
A codec it’s static, almost not changing at all over a decade. This allow you to implement it as a single purpose hardware which is orders of magnitude more efficient and fast than code running in a multipurpose chip, tensor or not.

For things that evolve fast, as deep learning, an programmable chip is the right choice.

The iPhone doesn't yet use M1. Besides, post-processing a video is one thing, encoding is completely different. What Apple does with the neural processing is most likely the analysis of the content, not the "editing".
In something like a mobile device, every watt counts. If it takes more energy to decode video on the tensor cores than it does to have a dedicated hardware block, you keep the hardware video decoder.