Industry Expert Blogs
Real-time H.265 4Kp30 video encoding: one FPGA or 32 multi-GHz, x86 microprocessor cores. Which would you choose?-April 10, 2014 |
H.265/HEVC video encoding consumes only half the bandwidth of H.264 encoding for the same video quality, which makes it essential for 4K2K video. Vanguard Video has developed an H.265/HEVC video codec that complies with the latest HEVC draft spec. Perhaps the most interesting aspect to this codec is that Vanguard has implemented a real-time version of it for 4Kp30 video in software (C and hand-tweaked, “to-the-max” assembly language for selected algorithms), which encourages comparison. The software version of the codec runs in real time on four 8-core Intel Xeon microprocessors and Barco Silex has implemented the same encoder, coded in an HDL by Vanguard, on a Xilinx VC709 Connectivity Kit based on one Virtex-7 690T FPGA. Suitably encouraged, we’ll make some comparisons right here.