Google-owned YouTube has given users a glimpse into a new system it uses for transcoding video that they upload much more efficiently at its data centers, at warehouse scale. YouTube engineers explained the process in a post.
“We decided to leverage an idea that computer scientists have been working on for years – to develop a special “brain” for this specific work. In other fields, there are special brains for graphics (GPUs) or artificial intelligence (TPUs). In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU).”
YouTube said by doing this, it had seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to the previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.
YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips – arstechnica.com
Enlarge / A Google Argos VCU. It transcodes video very quickly.
Google has decided that YouTube is such a huge transcoding workload that it needs to build its own server chips. The company detailed its new “Argos” chips in a YouTube blog post, a CNET interview, and in a paper for ASPLOS, the…
Link: YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips
via arstechnica.com
