"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far."
Sounds reasonable, given a fast cpu & less-than optimal hw-accelerated encoding options. As for that "something", maybe:
1) Drop hw-accelerated encoding and decoding entirely, and use the freed up silicon for much beefier cpus (like ones including -bigger- vector units, more cores etc. Cortex X?). That would be useful for any cpu heavy applications.
2) Include hw encoder for a common (1), relatively 'heavy' codec. And hw decoder for same + maybe others.
3) Only include decoder(s?), like they seem to have done for RPi5.
4) Include some kind of flexible compute fabric that can be configured to do the heavy lifting for popular video codecs.
Combined with:
5) Move to newer silicon node to obtain higher efficiency or transistor budget.
Whatever route a future RPi would go, imho hw-accelerated decoding is much more useful than encoding.
It's fair to say that not all Pi users are decoding video, but with the number of projects doing some sort of video-related workloads, with Pi's processing camera footage and doing CV work and people using Pi's as low power workstations as just two examples, it's reasonable that folks that had historically used Raspberry Pi compute units for video are disappointed to hear that they're now pushing a lot of CPU power to perform video decode and encode.
i have three pi's in my house. One that runs my plotter, one that runs my 3d printer and one that's, up until recently (I've moved it into my kube cluster), running pihole. shrug
"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far."
Sounds reasonable, given a fast cpu & less-than optimal hw-accelerated encoding options. As for that "something", maybe:
1) Drop hw-accelerated encoding and decoding entirely, and use the freed up silicon for much beefier cpus (like ones including -bigger- vector units, more cores etc. Cortex X?). That would be useful for any cpu heavy applications.
2) Include hw encoder for a common (1), relatively 'heavy' codec. And hw decoder for same + maybe others.
3) Only include decoder(s?), like they seem to have done for RPi5.
4) Include some kind of flexible compute fabric that can be configured to do the heavy lifting for popular video codecs.
Combined with:
5) Move to newer silicon node to obtain higher efficiency or transistor budget.
Whatever route a future RPi would go, imho hw-accelerated decoding is much more useful than encoding.