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When it comes to video encoding, the choice between hardware and software comes down to flexibility, latency, and cost.
One of the hardest choices encoding technicians have to make is deciding between hardware and software. Hardware-based encoders and transcoders have had a performance advantage over software since computers were invented. That's because dedicated, limited-purpose processors are designed to run a specific algorithm, while the general-purpose processor that runs encoding software is designed to handle several functions. It's the specialist versus the jack-of-all-trades.
In the past few years, processors and workflows have changed. The great disruptor has been time and the economics of Moore's Law, which famously says that the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months. The logical outcome of Moore's law is that the CPUs get more powerful by a factor of two every few years, but more recently processing power seems to double every few months. Lately, Intel -- whose co-founder Gordon Moore coined Moore's Law -- has been adding specialty functions along with its math co-processors to equalize the differences between general-use processors and specialty processors.
There are many layers and elements to both a general-purpose processor and a task-specific hardware processor. The general-purpose CPU is the most common -- there are literally billions of them in all manner of computing devices -- while the more purpose-oriented processors include digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and integrated circuits (ICs) that are available for various industrial appliances and widely used in cellphones. Many of the structures and elements are similar across all types, but there are considerable differences. If you are not familiar with the elements of the various types, here are the basic structures of both.
Via Nicolas Weil
