But existing CPUs already use accelerated decode for these tasks. They have been for years and years. Those hardware decode blocks just aren't powerful enough for 6K RAW video, but they are fine for YouTube, Netflix, and Zoom, and indeed it's already accelerated.
If there were no benefit, Apple wouldn't be able to decode 8K video with a low end Mac mini. People wouldn't be seeing vastly better battery life when viewing videos and using Zoom.
8K video decode isn't very useful when you can barely drive an 8K display, and certainly not for the average consumer.
As for wonderful battery life with Zoom, I am fairly certain that this is because Intel CPUs have a bad process that cripples their video decode performance.
The correct comparison would be with the 7nm or imminent 5nm Renoir APUs that have accelerated decode on an actually good process. Which is what you should compare M1 against, anyway.
But sure, if you want to compare them against obsolete Intel chips, you can, and you'll find improved battery life. It's just not a logical comparison, as Intel isn't the competition to M1 chips, the competition is AMD. And AMD does have high efficiency accelerated video decode on their laptop chips, and it also even supports 8K decoding, though it's almost useless. It is less useless than on an M1 computer though, because at least then you have enough I/O to actually run an 8K screen.
> 8K video decode isn't very useful when you can barely drive an 8K display, and certainly not for the average consumer.
You are talking in circles. This same exact hardware is used to decode lower resolution video. Benefits reach down to 6k, 4k, 2k, 1080p, 720p, etc etc. Any encoding you do.
> The correct comparison would be with the 7nm or imminent 5nm Renoir APUs that have accelerated decode on an actually good process. Which is what you should compare M1 against, anyway.
How exactly do you compare an unreleased product to an actual shipping one? Do we go to the land of hypothetical benchmarks where you just make up numbers for the unshipped product?
> And AMD does have high efficiency accelerated video decode on their laptop chips, and it also even supports 8K decoding, though it's almost useless.
Please share some details on these AMD based $699 systems which can edit 8k video. No-one is claiming you can't edit 8k video on other systems. The entire point is that you can do this on the cheapest system in Apple's lineup.
The 7nm Renoir APUs already came out. As for the 5nm, we don't have them yet even though they should release in a few months, but we have processors of the same architecture on a different process.
The M1 Mac Mini can only edit 8K video at a fairly low quality if you use the accelerated encode. If you're actually going to be doing real editing, you're going to only be using the 8K decode, and for that you can look at literally any Renoir APU system.
The cheapest system with a Renoir APU capable of accelerated 8K decode is 340$, so half of the cost of the Mac Mini.
As for this :
>You are talking in circles. This same exact hardware is used to decode lower resolution video. Benefits reach down to 6k, 4k, 2k, 1080p, 720p, etc etc. Any encoding you do
It's only talking in circles if you ignore the rest of the comment. Accelerated encode and decode with similar architectural efficiency is already there. The main advantage Apple has here is that, for a few months, they have a more power efficient process.
As for encode, literally no one has a solid use case for a laptop and hardware encoding over 1080p. For streaming video, anywhere over 1080p is useless on a laptop, and for actual video encoding, no one uses embedded accelerated encode because it's inherently of lower quality.
But sure, if for some absurd reason you want to edit video directly in 8K and don't care about the abysmal rendering times at high qualities, you can buy a 340$ Renoir SBC, enable Hardware Decode on your favorite video editing software, and be on your merry way with accelerated real-time decode of 8K - as long your video files are h264 or h265.
So there is literally no benefit.