VP9 & AV1 Have More Room To Improve For POWER & ARM Architectures

Luc Trudeau, a video compression wizard and co-author of the AV1 royalty-free video format, has written a piece about the optimization state for video formats like VP9 and AV1 on POWER and ARM CPU architectures.

Long story short, and jiving with our recent POWER9 benchmark results, video encoding performance in particular has a ways to be improved upon for these non-x86 CPU architectures: these ARM and POWER9 servers with high thread counts end up still losing to the lower thread count AMD/Intel CPUs in video encoding workloads.

Luc has discovered some areas for improvement within the code and is currently pursuing bounties for the work. Those interested in learning more about his testing and possible areas for exploiting greater performance for open-source video encode on ARM/POWER can find out all the details via this Medium.com post.