Hi all,

After speaking to several Intel executives during Computex, we learned
that Intel believes video encoding belongs on the CPU and always should
- we found its reasoning to be rather bizarre and full of holes, so
here's our take on things. If you could post a link on your site that
would be very much appreciated.

*Link:*
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/04/intel-says-video-encoding-belongs-on-the-cpu/1



*Quote:
*/""//When you're encoding on the CPU, the quality will be higher
because we're determining which parts of the scene need higher bit-rates
applying to them," said François Piednoel, senior performance analyst at
Intel.

Piednoel claimed that the CUDA video encoder will likely deliver poor
quality video encodes because it uses a brute force method of splitting
the scene up and treating each pixel the same. It's interesting that
Intel is taking this route, because one thing Nvidia //hasn't really
talked about so far is video quality.

"/ /The science of video encoding is about making smarter use of the
bits and not brute force," added Piednoel.

I asked Piednoel what will happen when Larrabee turns up because that
is, after all, a massively parallel processor. I thought it'd be
interesting to see if Intel would change its tune in the future once it
had something that had the raw processing power to deliver similar
application performance to what is being claimed with CUDA. Intel said
that comparing this to a GPU is impossible, because the GPU doesn't have
full x86 cores. With CUDA, you can only code programs in C and C++,
while x86 allows the developer to choose whatever programming language
they prefer -- that's obviously a massive boon to anyone that doesn't
code in C."/
*

*Cheers guys!

Tim Smalley
www.bit-tech.net