Cringley says Apple will add hardware h.264 decoding to Macs
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2...08_001806.html
Could this be one of the Top Secret features of Leopard? The ability to utilize new hardware encoding/decoding features in the nextgen Macs? Could this by why there are delays in the Macbook Pro and Mac Pros and Mac minis? This would be huge for new computers as the ability for all new computers to efficiently encode/decode AVC content would be a boon to HD movie downloads and a boon to iMovie/FCE/FCP encoding of HD material. I Want To Believe.
Quote:
Maybe you have wondered, as I have, why it takes a pretty robust notebook computer to play DVD videos, while Wal-Mart will sell you a perfectly capable progressive-scan DVD player from Philips for $38? In general, the dedicated DVD player is not only a lot cheaper, it works better, too, and the simple reason is because it decodes the DVD's MPEG-2 video stream in hardware, rather than in software. They won't run a spreadsheet, true, but DVD players are brilliant at doing what they are designed to do over and over again. And if the expedient here is a $7 MPEG-2 decoder chip, it's a wonder why such chips didn't appear long ago in PCs.
Well they are about to, after a fashion.
I'm not sure of the real reason why we haven't seen widespread video-decoding hardware in personal computers, which have largely used decoding software, instead. Maybe the reason is economic (save the $7) or maybe it is political (Microsoft or maybe Apple are for some reason opposed to hardware decoding). But like a lot of real reasons, I think it probably comes down to hubris and the simple fact that by decoding video in software, road warriors have another incentive to buy a more expensive -- and more powerful -- computer.
Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.
Why Apple would do this is fairly clear to me, but first let's clarify what I mean by hardware video decoding, because it isn't implicitly the MPEG-2 format used in present-day DVDs. I'm not saying Apple's video-decoder chip won't also decode MPEG-2 (it may or may not -- I simply don't know), but the chip's primary codec is H.264, which is at the heart of both Apple's QuickTime software and its iTunes video downloading service.
WHY Apple would add H.264 video-decoding hardware to its entire line of PCs comes down to supporting iTunes and any similar video distribution efforts Apple may spring on us. By going with a chip, Apple ensures the same base performance level from every machine it sells, from the lowliest Mac Mini right up to the mightiest four-core Mac Pro. Up until now it took a multi-core machine with a lot of memory to support real 1080p (HDTV) decoding, but soon you'll be able to do that easily on a Mac Mini while leaving the main CPU to handle other chores like networking, running the graphical user interface, or perhaps integrating in real time a variety of video ad streams.
Apple's new policy, if true, will turn on its head the whole notion of forcing users upmarket if they want better video support. THE POLICY WILL COST APPLE MONEY, not just for the video chip, but also for the lost sales of higher performance machines.
So what's in it for Apple? Potentially a lot, because the chip Apple has chosen doesn't cost $7, it costs more like $50, and it doesn't just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.
This will change everything. Soon even the lowliest Mac will be able to effortlessly record in background one or more video signals while the user runs TurboTax on the screen. Macs will become superb DVR machines with TiVo-like functionality yet smaller file sizes than any TiVo box could ever produce. In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone.
It's an aggressive play that fits perfectly with Apple's traditional role as the hardware platform of choice for new media development. And I am sure the company will have at least one new service or application that will uniquely support this new chip upon which Apple is placing a $500+ million bet.
Remember, you read it here first.
Maybe you have wondered, as I have, why it takes a pretty robust notebook computer to play DVD videos, while Wal-Mart will sell you a perfectly capable progressive-scan DVD player from Philips for $38? In general, the dedicated DVD player is not only a lot cheaper, it works better, too, and the simple reason is because it decodes the DVD's MPEG-2 video stream in hardware, rather than in software. They won't run a spreadsheet, true, but DVD players are brilliant at doing what they are designed to do over and over again. And if the expedient here is a $7 MPEG-2 decoder chip, it's a wonder why such chips didn't appear long ago in PCs.
Well they are about to, after a fashion.
I'm not sure of the real reason why we haven't seen widespread video-decoding hardware in personal computers, which have largely used decoding software, instead. Maybe the reason is economic (save the $7) or maybe it is political (Microsoft or maybe Apple are for some reason opposed to hardware decoding). But like a lot of real reasons, I think it probably comes down to hubris and the simple fact that by decoding video in software, road warriors have another incentive to buy a more expensive -- and more powerful -- computer.
Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.
Why Apple would do this is fairly clear to me, but first let's clarify what I mean by hardware video decoding, because it isn't implicitly the MPEG-2 format used in present-day DVDs. I'm not saying Apple's video-decoder chip won't also decode MPEG-2 (it may or may not -- I simply don't know), but the chip's primary codec is H.264, which is at the heart of both Apple's QuickTime software and its iTunes video downloading service.
WHY Apple would add H.264 video-decoding hardware to its entire line of PCs comes down to supporting iTunes and any similar video distribution efforts Apple may spring on us. By going with a chip, Apple ensures the same base performance level from every machine it sells, from the lowliest Mac Mini right up to the mightiest four-core Mac Pro. Up until now it took a multi-core machine with a lot of memory to support real 1080p (HDTV) decoding, but soon you'll be able to do that easily on a Mac Mini while leaving the main CPU to handle other chores like networking, running the graphical user interface, or perhaps integrating in real time a variety of video ad streams.
Apple's new policy, if true, will turn on its head the whole notion of forcing users upmarket if they want better video support. THE POLICY WILL COST APPLE MONEY, not just for the video chip, but also for the lost sales of higher performance machines.
So what's in it for Apple? Potentially a lot, because the chip Apple has chosen doesn't cost $7, it costs more like $50, and it doesn't just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.
This will change everything. Soon even the lowliest Mac will be able to effortlessly record in background one or more video signals while the user runs TurboTax on the screen. Macs will become superb DVR machines with TiVo-like functionality yet smaller file sizes than any TiVo box could ever produce. In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone.
It's an aggressive play that fits perfectly with Apple's traditional role as the hardware platform of choice for new media development. And I am sure the company will have at least one new service or application that will uniquely support this new chip upon which Apple is placing a $500+ million bet.
Remember, you read it here first.
Could this be one of the Top Secret features of Leopard? The ability to utilize new hardware encoding/decoding features in the nextgen Macs? Could this by why there are delays in the Macbook Pro and Mac Pros and Mac minis? This would be huge for new computers as the ability for all new computers to efficiently encode/decode AVC content would be a boon to HD movie downloads and a boon to iMovie/FCE/FCP encoding of HD material. I Want To Believe.
Comments
more oomph. In fact h.264/AVC requires roughly 8x the processing power on encode and 4x the processing power on decode as compared to MPEG2. How does Apple ensure that the user experience for all Macs is sufficient? They can add faster GPU from Nividia and AMD and take advantage of their processing of video with PureVideo and Avivo, or they could add a seperate DSP chip dedicated to handling encoding and decoding. This dovetails right into the iTunes/Apple TV realm.
The Apple TV is clearly setup for HD 720p content.
The problem with technologies like ATI's Avivo and Nvidias PureVideo is that they are GPU specific. If Apple adds a dedicated chip for encode/decode in EVERY Mac this guarantees a base level of performance.
I could easily see them doing this as they have been talking about Top Secret featues in Leopard for a while. Now what type of Top Secret feature can Apple deliver that doesn't require Developer advanced notice? Well anything that deals with Quicktime.
Say that Apple has encourage Developers to write their apps against the new 64-bit QTkit frameworks. So Developers do this thinking that this is the new shiny API that they should be using. What they may not realize is that the core of this new API may very well tie into a DSP engine. Apple's worked hard to abstract the new QTkit from hardware dependencies thus once the API has been written against Apple could conceivably attach these calls to any piece of hardware they want to. [/FONT]
That would indeed be a killer feature. Video encoding is so dog slow and slow machines struggle to decode which wrecks the presentation of media.
It also ties in very nicely with the famous Apple mission statement 'It just works'
I would love to see this.
Why would a top secret feature in Leopard be a top secret feature in hardware - Leopard is software. I was thinking more along the lines of a fundamentally different Core Animation dependent Finder, a completely new UI and something totally unexpected with Time Machine type of shock-factor.
We could see the birth of a new application or at the very least some serious modifications to current frameworks. Leopard would have to be the key that unlocks this new DSP. Kind of makes you wonder if Apple's delaying iLife 07 because of this (assuming the rumor is true of course)
Of course I'd be left out with the millions of users that don't have new computers so I get your point.
That would indeed be a killer feature. Video encoding is so dog slow and slow machines struggle to decode which wrecks the presentation of media.
IIRC, didn't you write a little while back that AVC playback via hardware wouldn't be soon in coming? You wrote that the algorithms were too hard to implement in silicon.
IIRC, didn't you write a little while back that AVC playback via hardware wouldn't be soon in coming? You wrote that the algorithms were too hard to implement in silicon.
No that wouldn't be me. Any algorithm can be implemented in silicon is my guess. AVC simply requires much more processing power to encode/decode versus MPEG2 but I knew that we'd eventually get some sort of support. It actually happened much faster than I though it would as well.
Apple may as well move in this direction as AMD is already eyeballing this with Torrenza.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrenza
[B]Torrenza[/B] is an initiative announced by AMD to improve support for the integration of specialized coprocessors in systems based on AMD Opteron microprocessors. Torrenza does not refer to a specific product or specific technology, though the primary focus is on the integration of coprocessor devices directly connected to the Opteron processors' Hypertransport links. The initiative's stated goals include improving technical and technology support for third party developers of coprocessor devices, reducing the cost of implementing HyperTransport interfaces on these devices, and improving the performance of the integrated system.
The Torrenza label is applied to both accelerator projects that pre-date the announcement of the program (on June 1, 2006) as well as projects announced more recently.
Goals
AMD expects tightly-integrated coprocessor technology to be a proving ground for developing and assessing those computational technologies that may eventually migrate onto the processor die itself. By building a platform that can accept 3rd party co-processors, the industry can build advanced hardware solutions and provide an environment for development of the application software required to support advanced hardware technology. Torrenza therefore is a stepping stone to the advanced CPU designs of the future and also provides a platform for software development needed for those hardware designs.
Nice to see that we're moving back to a more stratified hardware design. I remember the whole "The CPU can do everything" chant years ago and while that makes for cheaper computers it certainly doesn't cut muster like specialized devices/ASISC do IMO.
If you thought that Dell was on the ropes now, wait a while!
V/R,
Aries 1B
I don't see why this wasn't done a long time ago! I know some GPUs have hardware DVD decoding, but it should really be on the mb.
Some? ATI has had it since the original Radeon. nVidia hasn't been doing it for quite as long, but I think maybe they started with the 6xxx series. I think Intel's 950 has MPEG-2 HD decoding.
What I heard the problem was that Apple uses the graphics chip in such a way that the decoder doesn't work. I don't know if it's because they don't use the hardware overlay or what, I didn't understand the particulars.
Well I said in January (here) Apple was going to go whole hog with h.264 and AppleTV. I thought they would use software codecs then. Going with this in hardware makes it even more likely though. With hardware, any stream that plays can be transcoded on the fly for essentially zero cost, making just about ANY format that QT plays available to the AppleTV. All for VERY LITTLE Apple software development effort, just a wrapper that shunts QT video to the chip, and then on to the AirPort n.
Could this be why Apple is so quiet about 720p content in iTunes?
Here's a media processor
http://www.3dlabs.com/content/mediaProcessor.asp
3Dlabs DMS-02
The 3Dlabs DMS-02 media processor is an advanced System-on-Chip (SoC) ideally suited to delivering high quality video, audio, graphics, imaging and compute intensive applications within a low power environment. Its unique array architecture brings the flexibility and scalability of a software approach with the performance and efficiency of dedicated hardware.
Array Processor
Fully programmable 100MHz array
CPU like instruction set
Pre-emptive multitasking
32-bit IEEEand 16-bit floats
24 processing elements
Video Processing
Flexible CODEC support
Including; MPEG 2/3/4, H.264, Microsoft® WMV9, XVid, DivX®
iDCT, motion compensation, scaling, rotation, CSC
Digital Rights Managament (DRM)
Audio Processing
Flexible audio CODEC support, including MP3, AAC, Microsoft® WMA
Advanced 3D audio processing
2D Graphics Processing
2Dlib and DirectFB
Vector graphics
BitBlt, rasterOps, fill, rotate, color key, transparency, line and polygon
3D Graphics Processing
OpenGL ES
Full floating point pipeline
Vertex and pixel processing
8/16/32 bit framebuffer
16/32-bit z-buffer
Alpha blend, dither and fog
YUV and RGB textures
Bilinear/trilinear filtering
Mip-mapping
Antialiasing
Floating Point Compute Processing
The media processing array can be used for any application acceleration
Compute library supported (e.g. FFT and FIR filters)
ARM Processor Core
Dual 200MHz ARM 926 EJ-S Cores
32-bit RISC CPU
Java Byte code execution
8K data
16K instruction cache
Interfaces
General Interface Bus - 8/16/32 - bit asynchronous
2x UART
SPI / SSI / Microwire
8x GPIO pins
I2S, I2C, SPDIF and JTAG
VideoStream Ports
3x high bandwidth, bi-directional digital video I/O ports
Multi-function (LCD, Camera, TV encode/decode, etc.)
Resolutions up to 1280x1024 at 24bpp
Power Management
Dynamic clock gating
Voltage scaling
Memory sleep modes
Low power RTC
Why would a top secret feature in Leopard be a top secret feature in hardware - Leopard is software.
cos software runs on hardware.. be it a PPC, single core intel or octo core Mac Pro, if ALL new macs get an extra chip, why wouldnt you have your software take advantage of that?
and yeah, keep it a secret.
go back and re-read Murchs first reply
and bare in mind that multi touch NEEDS new hardware as well.. even though its just a change in the software REALLY
tack me down as a purchaser of at LEAST a new iMac 20" if this is true!
DAMN YOU APPLE!!
IF true i am BOYAAAAAANT!
Nice to see that we're moving back to a more stratified hardware design. I remember the whole "The CPU can do everything" chant years ago and while that makes for cheaper computers it certainly doesn't cut muster like specialized devices/ASISC do IMO.
I thought it was cyclical, repeating about once a decade or so. I think AMD is doing it both ways though, they are making nearly self-contained systems on a chip, and they are also giving more options to have separate, dedicated components. I'm not sure Torrenza will give them a competitive advantage such that it becomes a widely used platform. It would seem to be of benefit mainly to very specialized uses, otherwise I'd think that PCIe should be sufficient, it doesn't require a specific platform or specific company's products..
The first quote reads like a bit of speculative ranting from a fanatic to me.
I'm not sure if Cringely is an Apple user.
must remember to double check everything
Doh!
I'm not sure if Cringely is an Apple user.
I guess he could've switched to Windows or Linux, but since Robert Cringely was Apple employee No. 12, it's hard to believe he's not an Apple user or fan.