Will Qualcomm's SoC finally support the AV1 codec in 2023?

' AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) ' is a video codec that has been developed under the initiative of Google and Netflix. Qualcomm, a major semiconductor fabless company, plans to add support for the AV1 codec in its flagship mobile SoC, the Snapdragon series, reports IT-related news site Protocol.

Waiting for AV1 --Protocol
https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/entertainment/av1-open-video-codec?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

AV1 is a video codec jointly developed by well-known technology companies such as Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, and NVIDIA, and was officially released in March 2018. AV1 is royalty-free and features improved compression efficiency compared to conventional VP9.

Video codec 'AV1' led by Google and Netflix is officially released, expecting the spread of 4K streaming --GIGAZINE

YouTube and Netflix, which are video streaming sites participating in the development, have already adopted AV1 for the purpose of suppressing the increase in traffic, and Chrome and Firefox, which are web browsers, also adopt the AV1 decoder and enable it by default. In addition, it became clear that Samsung's 4nm process SoC 'Exynos 2200' announced in January 2022 integrates an AV1 decoder because of its high power efficiency.

Samsung announces 4nm process SoC 'Exynos 2200' equipped with AMD's RDNA2 architecture Xclipse GPU, enabling ray tracing and variable rate shading by hardware acceleration --GIGAZINE

However, Qualcomm, which holds a large share of SoCs for smartphones, has not participated in the development of AV1, and the Qualcomm SoCs released so far did not natively support AV1.

Alex Katouzian , senior vice president of mobile computing infrastructure (MCI) at Qualcomm, was asked about AV1 support in an interview with technical news site AnandTech . The time it takes to deploy the device is very important to meet your needs, so we don't support AV1. We may, but not so far, support it in the future. I didn't want to do it, but I didn't have a plan to do it in time, 'he said, not denying the possibility that Qualcomm's SoC would be natively compatible with AV1.

According to an informant that Protocol saw the chip spec sheet, Qualcomm's Adreno core is the first Qualcomm to natively support AV1 in a SoC codenamed 'SM8550'. That. The SM8550 will be released as early as the end of 2022 and will be implemented on smartphones in 2023.

The AV1 codec was a standard developed in collaboration with a well-known technology company aiming for high image quality and high compression efficiency in preparation for the times when watching videos on the Internet is commonplace, but the hardware is not sufficient. It has not been widely used since then, and it cannot be said that it is a mainstream video codec. Protocol suggests that Qualcomm's support for AV1 may lead to widespread adoption of AV1 from 2023.