Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Month: May 2010

  • Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder

    Diary Of An x264 Developer » (4/25/2010)

    For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools.  Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.

    The move towards Blu-ray encoding is very encouraging. In reading the article I don’t see a mention of CUDA or OpenCL acceleration of the encoding process. As was the case for MPEG-2 a glaring need for acceleration of the process was painfully obvious once people started converting long form videos. I know x264 encoding can be accelerated by splitting threads across CPUs on a multi-core processor. But why not unleash the floodgates and get some extra horsepower from the ATI or nVidia graphics card too. We’re talking large frames and large frame rates and the only way to guarantee adoption of the new format is to make the encoding process fast, fast, fast.

  • Apple admits to eating ‘iPad chip designer’ • The Register

    Last year, Samsung told the world it had teamed with Instrinsity on a 1GHz ARM chip known as the Hummingbird, and Samsung manufactures the ARM chips underpinning the Apple iPhone, a smaller version of the iPad. This has led many to assume that the Hummingbird architecture is the basis for the the A4.

    via Apple admits to eating ‘iPad chip designer’ • The Register.

    I am sure that Apple’s ability to act quickly and independently helped win them not just design expertise, but an actual nearly finished CPU in the form of the Hummingbird project. There does now seem to be a smartphone Megahertz War similar to the bad old days of desktop computing when AMD and Intel fought it out 1 gigahertz at a time. We will see what comes of this when the new iPhones come out this Summer. A4 may not translate into a handheld cpu form factor. But looking at the iFixit teardown of the iPad makes me think the iPad motherboard is almost the size of a cell phone! So who knows, maybe A4 is scalable down to iPhone as well. We’ll find out in June I’m sure when Apple hosts its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, CA.