Flow Computing Podcast Series: Prof. Dr. Jörg Keller on Video processing & beyond (Episode 3: Use cases of PPU)

In Episode 3 of our Flow Computing podcast series, Prof. Dr. Jörg Keller goes beyond AI to explore real-world applications where the PPU's flexibility drives significant performance improvements, with video processing emerging as a prime example.

Professor Keller explains that video applications—both encoding and decoding—exhibit a high degree of parallelism that is often underutilized by current CPU architectures. As 4K resolution and higher frame rates become standard, the need for efficient parallel processing is more critical than ever.

"Applications that are run nowadays quite frequently involve video. So, the easiest thing might be video decoders, used when we play a pre-recorded video. Those decoders typically exhibit a sufficient amount of parallelism, which is often either not exploited or not exploited very well." - Prof. Dr. Jörg Keller

Transcript

JÖRG KELLER: Applications that are run nowadays quite frequently involve video. So, the easiest thing might be video decoders, used when we play a pre-recorded video.

JK: Those decoders typically exhibit a sufficient amount of parallelism, which is often either not exploited or not exploited very well. On the other hand, a growing fraction of videos are going from high definition to 4K resolution, and we are also seeing higher frame rates. So, we need more processing performance, and this could be delivered by parallelization via PPUs without the need for energy-hungry processes.

JK: The other side is the production of synthetic video from scripts, for example, presenting avatars or explaining concepts to people without pre-recorded videos. So, the video production also needs computing performance in real-time, which could be provided through PPU cores, which are less power-hungry than the traditional CPU cores we have today.

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