Efficient Video encoding on the cloud with Arm servers

82% of all internet traffic is Video - whether it be live-streaming, video-on-demand or video-conferencing. Recent trends in remote working and social media have been fueling demand for more video content to be streamed from the cloud to a variety of devices. This requires video to be compressed and transcoded to different formats on the cloud before it is sent out. This encoding/transcoding consumes a significant amount of compute resources in the cloud which keeps increasing with newer codec standards and HD/4k content.

Arm has been working with various developers in the video codec community to optimize both legacy and current codecs like H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1 for Arm Neoverse family, leveraging the Neon instruction set. We have observed between 1.5x to 2x gains in performance using routines optimized for Neon. In addition, running compute-intensive video codecs on Arm Neoverse based server platforms leads to 33% lower costs and up to half the total power consumption compared to similar x86 based server platforms.

This session describes the work done on the above codecs, various popular/emerging use-cases for them, and what to expect in terms of performance gains by using the latest optimized codecs for Arm.