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A comment on It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube. Parent comment

Re:It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube by BooneJS on Friday February 24, 2023 @09:33AM (#34924839)
“In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU). We’ve seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.”

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...

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Re:It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube by kevincox on Friday February 24, 2023 @10:49AM (#34925694)
If I had to guess these are used for urgent video transcodes. New uploads to popular channels and on-demand transcoding. I suspect that CPUs are still often used for background batch encoding. But maybe 20x is enough that the power cost of extra CPU usage isn't worth it and they will do it all in hardware.
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