Re:Servers for an Accelerated Future
by wmf on Monday February 24, 2020 @02:32PM
(#22407520)
I could imagine CloudFlare using GPUs for image optimization or video encoding. They do a lot more than caching these days.
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Neither is “great” on a GPU:
• Image optimization is still mostly software: JPEG, PNG, WebP. GPUs do not bring much to the table here at all, and consume a lot of power, which is likely to upset the hosting ISP of that cache node.
• Video encoding is better, but still average. NVENC (Nvidia’s encode Engine) has some quality challenges and limitations.
Further, doing this at the edge makes less sense: if you have to fetch the source material from the origin, do the heavy lifting centrally and store the results at the edge. Storing 4-5 renditions is cheap compared to GPU running costs here.