[philistine]

On a microcontroller doing nothing else sure. But on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, you absolutely want hardware decode to preserve your battery life.

[nulld3v]

That's their point though. Basically no modern phone/laptop/tablet other than Apple offloads audio decoding (of any codec) to hardware. You can check this on Android phones by installing the Codec Info app.

[coldtea]

Snapdragon chips do (used in many/most androids), Samsung own exynos also does iirc.

If the OS/platform doesn't use it that could be another thing, but those chips do offer audio coded decoding, including aac

[philistine]

Yeah no. All chips in computers, tablets, etc. have hardware decode. Intel chips have hardware decode. AMD, Arm, Raspberry Pi, what have you.

[LtdJorge]

I’m pretty sure no x86 chip has hardware decode/encode for audio. Together with dGPUs, they tend to have decoders for JPEG and decoders/encoders for H.264, H.265, AV1 and sometimes VP9.

[atiedebee]

They have hardware decoders for JPEG? I have never heard of this and it seems overkill considering how simple it is to decode.

[rasz]

https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/rocjpeg-d...

https://alax.info/blog/1992

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder added around H.265 in UVD 6.0

[LtdJorge]

There’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardwar...

Seems like Nvidia doesn’t support JPEG in NVDEC.

[cogman10]

Audio decode is extremely cheap. It's true that a hardware implementation will be more efficient, but really not a whole lot more.

[rasz]

on a 30MHz microcontroller