Originally posted by RealNC
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I should mention that some of the video decode work (particularly the variable length decode (aka entropy decode) doesn't have much inherent parallelism and isn't the kind of thing that the GPU core does particularly well. Once you have gotten through the entropy decode, however, the rest of the work (starting with inverse quantization) is more amenable to generic GPU processing. Encoding is even more GPU-friendly, since motion estimation involves some godawful-expensive sweeps through the image looking for pattern matches, and GPUs are really good at that kind of thing.
It's really the bit-pickin' work where dedicated hardware is most useful. Fortunately the entropy decode is a relatively small part of the workload and is at the front of the pipeline so doing it on CPU is not a problem.
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