'YouTube building its video-transcoding chip' says Jeff Calow

SAN FRANCISCO: Google has developed a custom chip, Argos, for YouTube to process videos much more efficiently. Google's Jeff Calow said the Argos chip has brought "up to 20-33x improvements in computing efficiency compared to our previous optimised system, which was running software on traditional servers." The VCU package is a full-length PCI-E card and looks a lot like a graphics card. A board has two Argos ASIC chips buried under a gigantic, passively cooled aluminum heat sink.

There's even what looks like an 8-pin power connector on the end because PCI-E just isn't enough power, reports ArsTechnica.

Google provided a chip diagram that lists 10 "encoder cores" on each chip, with Google's white paper adding that "all other elements are off-the-shelf IP blocks." Google said that "each encoder core can encode 2160p in real time, up to 60 FPS (frames per second) using three reference frames," the report said. (IANS)

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