| How RapiHD™ Works Broadcast-quality, high-definition video processing has always required dedicated hardware: Digital Signal Processor (DSP) farms, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), or high-end specialized integrated circuits (ICs). Until now. Elemental Technologies has harnessed the power of modern graphics processing units (GPU, the chip inside every personal computer that draws your desktop and makes 3D games run fast) to perform video encoding, decoding, transcoding, and pixel processing tasks on commodity hardware. The result is RapiHD™: a flexible, powerful software platform that provides incredible video quality at the lowest total system cost. |
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When video is processed with CPU-only software (on left), frames are broken into macroblocks and processed one block at a time, requiring long render times and very high CPU utilization. With ETI's RapiHD™ software (on right), frames are still broken into macroblocks, but all macroblocks are processed concurrently on a massively parallel GPU, yielding far higher throughput than CPU-only solutions. |
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 RapiHD™ AdvantagesRapiHD™ allows system designers to take full advantage of the benefits provided by modern GPU architectures. These include: Performance. GPUs offer dramatically more performance (see Performance chart above) than the best DSP can offer. Cost. Due to the volumes shipped into the desktop PC marketplace, GPUs offer significantly more performance per dollar (see Price Efficiency chart to the left). Power. GPUs are ahead of DSPs on the manufacturing curve, and power constraints for mobile devices have dramatically lowered overall GPU consumption. Footprint. A single GPU has the computational horsepower of more than 100 DSPs. This means less board and system real estate required to implement Flexibility. The RapiHD™ platform architecture runs on Linux, Windows, or MacOS-based systems.  Why The GPU?Traditionally, high-performance video processing systems have required large silicon arrays of Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Until now, these specialized devices have been the only programmable solutions that scaled sufficiently to handle the enormous amount of computation required to perform high quality, high-definition encoding, image processing, and transcoding tasks. Unfortunately, these systems require substantial initial NRE investments as well as a high cost of goods sold for the life of the product. The RapiHD™ software platform harnesses the power of modern GPUs, eliminating the need for specialized video processing hardware. By leveraging the vastly superior processing power and memory bandwidth of GPU hardware, RapiHD™ delivers high quality video processing faster than any competing solutions, at a dramatically lower cost point. Why the GPU? The answer is simple. It’s qualitatively better in every respect. |
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