Mesa VCN JPEG Decode Patches Posted For AMD Raven Ridge

[Prescience500]

If I had to guess, this is mostly for power saving and battery life.

[Nille]

Like schmidttbag. Without patched libjpeg oder libjpeg-turbo nothing will use this feature.

[chithanh]

Now if there only were some non-shitty notebooks with these APUs out there...

Oh, there are actually three such Raven Ridge notebooks.

• Huawei Matebook D Ryzen Edition
• Honor Magicbook (which is very similar to the Matebook)
• Dell Latitude 5495

Honorable mention is the HP Envy x360 15z which even has a FreeSync screen. Though that is not advertised anywhere by HP/AMD, for whatever reason.

I can however totally understand why you lament the absence of good Ryzen notebooks. AMD marketing does an extremely poor job here, promoting the only the absolute worst notebooks, like the HP 15-db0050ng (paid review, honest review) and the crapfest that is the Lenovo Ideapad 720S-13ARR. I have seen the 720S so many times on sale here, dropping insanely in price. Lenovo must have overestimated demand and are sitting on a pile of them, and/or someone (AMD?) is paying for these promos.

There's no 4k screen

I think no AMD notebook ever had a 4K screen.

I mean, I can get an Intel based notebook for 800€ that has a fantastic 13.3" 3200x1800 (276 dpi) screen, or one that costs 1300€ and has a 13.3" 3840x2160 (331 dpi) screen. But if I want >200 dpi with AMD there is only one HP model with last generation APU that has a 14" 2560x1440 (210 dpi) for an insane 1500€.

[Guest]

Oh, there are actually three such Raven Ridge notebooks.

• Huawei Matebook D Ryzen Edition
• Honor Magicbook (which is very similar to the Matebook)
• Dell Latitude 5495

Honorable mention is the HP Envy x360 15z which even has a FreeSync screen. Though that is not advertised anywhere by HP/AMD, for whatever reason.

I didn't know about the Huawei Matebook D. It looks quite sexy but it seems they're only selling the Ryzen version in the US. Also, I don't like the 16:9 ratio but I guess that's normal with Windows laptops.

[TheLexMachine]

The purposes of the JPEG decoding now built into AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs are....

1. AI image processing. This is big money stuff that all the companies are trying to get in on. It has massive profit potential tied to hardware sales, from embedded camera systems, all the way to data center hardware.

2. MJPEG video. Many webcams don't have their own encoder circuit built into the hardware, so that video has to be encoded somehow, and the ASIC handles that without taxing CPU resources. This is particularly useful for mobile devices. I'm not sure if any MJPEG hardware codec has ever been used on Linux, but there are Windows implementations.

3. Use by image viewing/editing apps, via "hardware acceleration". This has been available on Windows for some time and is pretty much standard now, but Linux does not have this functionality beyond the capabilities of libjpeg-turbo and whatever specialized API and software combinations are employed in rare circumstances.

As far as hardware acceleration goes, libjpeg-turbo can't use the GPU, because the methods are a 180 from how libjpeg-turbo already works, so the plumbing just isn't compatible and another API has to be designed to use that hardware. The guy who does the work was paid to do it and found out that it just couldn't be done. There has been talk of TurboJPEG - another JPEG API developed by corporate interests, but not used by Linux distros or devs - being retooled for that, but I don't find much of anything out there about it other than it exists.

Nvidia has their own NVJPEG API that is now being used by specialized applications to use CUDA cores for image processing and decoding on their GPUs. Intel has their own JPEG ASIC and CU processing with their own GPUs. AMD has been pushing OpenCL image decoding/processing on Linux for years, but it hasn't caught on. Mobile/embedded chipsets on Android often use OpenCL. As all of these are different ways and means, none of them are standardized and in wide use on Linux, which is why everyone uses libjpeg/libjpeg-turbo, as developer resources are finite and there's only so much to go around.

[chithanh]

I didn't know about the Huawei Matebook D. It looks quite sexy but it seems they're only selling the Ryzen version in the US.

Huawei are selling the Ryzen Matebook D in the EU too.

Denmark: https://www.power.dk/pc-og-tilbehoer...er/p-906160/8/
Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01LYV3JZL
Poland: https://allegro.pl/huawei-matebook-d...608358300.html

If you cannot get it in your country, then the Honor Magicbook from Gearbest is shipped worldwide: https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_...ml?wid=1349303