What is YouTube's proprietary chip 'Argos' for video conversion?



A large number of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, and hundreds of millions of people are watching them on various devices. Google software engineer Jeff Callow explains the

codec technology needed for creators to seamlessly upload videos and deliver videos to viewers in the right resolution.

Reimagining video infrastructure to empower YouTube
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastructure

YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-building-its-own-video-transcoding-chips/

It's important to understand that videos are created and uploaded in a single format, but ultimately they are viewed on different devices, such as TVs and smartphones, and in different resolutions. One of the tasks of Callow's infrastructure team is to compress the video in a process called 'transcoding' and convert it to a minimum amount of data for different devices.

However, it is inefficient to perform such processing on a normal computer CPU, so Callow et al . Developed a unique chip 'Argos ' that performs transcoding and software dedicated to Argos. Furthermore, it is said that they have formed a 'video transcoding unit (VCU)' that puts all of them together. The image of VCU is below.



The composition of Argos is as follows, 10 encoder cores (green) each use 3 reference frames to encode videos with 2160p resolution in real time. 'Using Argos has improved computational efficiency by 20 to 33 times compared to traditional systems,' says Callow. Recently, the demand for high-resolution video has increased, and

data-efficient codecs such as VP9 are being adopted from the conventional standard of H.264 , but VP9 uses 5 times more computer resources for encoding, so Argos Callow said he needed to develop a chip like this.



'Hardware creation is a long-term effort, and we will continue to develop it with a view to using AV1 more efficiently than VP9,' said Jeff.

Related Posts:

in Web Service,   Hardware,   Video, Posted by log1p_kr