
Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode – Linux Support Lands - gardaani
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Gen12-Xe-AV1-Decode-Media
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ksec
Well the title would be more accurate as _GPGPU_ Accelerated Decode.

It gives the false assumption that AV1 is being Hardware Accelerated in Intel
Xe GPU which often means dedicated decoding block to decode the video codec in
lowest energy usage possible.

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tagrun
That's not GPGPU/compute though and Gen 12+ _does_ have hardware accelerated
decoding for AV1:

[https://github.com/intel/media-
driver/blob/master/README.md#...](https://github.com/intel/media-
driver/blob/master/README.md#decodingencoding-features)

"AV1 hardware decoding is supported from Gen12+ platforms."

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Sebb767
It's going to be highly interesting whether Intel can compete in this market.
GPUs are quite hard and, compared CPUs, haven't stagnated much.

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hydroreadsstuff
If you factor out chip size and clock frequency, they do actually stagnate.
They add new features, but legacy rendering performance is improved by single-
digit percentage points, I believe.

If you look at A100 compared to V100 for e.g. FP32 FMA performance (not
tensor). 14.1TFLOPS -> 19.5 = +38%, for 2x transistors (16->7nm), +35% SMs and
250W->400W is not that great. Note that NVIDIA uses boost clock for all A100
numbers and seems not have published any base clock so far. So their is a
chance that actual sustained A100 performance is lower.

Turing GPUs have rather large dies. TU102 754nm vs GP102 471nm. So comparing
them as is, isn't quite fair.

On the CPU front Intel used to use rather small dies for consumers (and even
use die shrinks to just cram more chips onto a waver -> more $$$), but now
that AMD forces their hand, they are giving in. But of course a lot this area
goes into extra cores, not single threaded performance (diminishing returns
there).

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pizza234
Well, from the user perspective, chip size and clock are crucial factors, as
GPU workloads tend to be parallelizable. Besides, chip size and clock don't
come for free, so I think they shouldn't be discarded regardless.

AFAIK, with each generation, Nvidia has increased raw performance by 20-30%,
which is significant.

On the other hand, the wall of physical limits is getting closer (which may
restrict the chip size), but until then, GPUs are faring very well.

GPUs functionalities also have a very different nature (as you point out), but
this can play well for the user. Realism depends on many functionalities,
which have plenty of headroom for improvement (in the sense of hardware
support); see ray tracing, which supposedly, is going to be significantly
faster on Ampere.

