Video Processing Perspectives

Now that we have some products out the door, we have been focusing on making the core technology even faster than ever using off-the-shelf NVIDIA GPUs.  One of the biggest boosts in speed will come from taking advantage of multiple GPUs in the system.  Here is a sneak peek of what we are doing to leverage a multi-GPU system. Multi-Movie Parallel Transcode The most straightforward way to take advantage of multiple GPUs in the system is to send separate transcode jobs to each GPU.  This means one GPU could be transcoding one movie while another one can transcode a second one each at their already very fast speeds.  We have been prototyping this using Badaboom already by launching 2 Badabooms each using a different GPU in the system transcoding different movies.   Doing this essentially doubles the already fast speed achieved with Badaboom.

3000 Cray1 supercomputers in your PC

If you are a software developer, the thought of half a teraflop of performance in your PC for around $250 starts to get the creative juices flowing. You start thinking, "What can I do with all that power?" and "How do I program it to do what I want?" NVIDIA and AMD are giving us 10s, 100s, and soon thousands of processors that will execute in parallel ... now what?!

The Serial Universe     We have spent most of our careers writing software that reads like a book. Line by line, the software code tells the processor what to do and the processor happily executes it serially. When the program is complete, the processor obediently waits for the next program to run.  Operating systems (OS) such as Windows, Linux and MAC OS have helped us run many programs on one processor. Programs that need input or output from keyboards, printers, disk drives, or other programs, are scheduled by the operating system to run on the processor in the computer. They have helped us share the one processor with many programs or users in a fair and efficient way. Support for multiple processors in the OS has been increasing, but to get the highest performance out of an application, it must be written properly to take advantage of the processors and memory cache.  Intel and AMD have built incredible serial processors that execute the majority of the applications on a PC today, but they are hitting performance barriers in clock speed and are adding processors to compensate. There is a new methodology on the horizon...