Comment by IshKebab
7 months ago
There's no point having reference RTL. The point of reference software is to demonstrate the correct behaviour for people implementing production grade libraries and RTL. Having an RTL version of that wouldn't add anything - it should have identical behaviour.
Providing a production grade verified RTL implementation would obviously be useful but also entire companies exist to do that and they charge a lot of money for it.
Could help people on the hobby or lower budget FPGA side. H.264/5/etc never really made it
There is absolutely no way an FPGA would make sense. The requirements for AV1 and H265 far exceed the hardware resources of lower budget FPGAs. For the same process, FPGA logic density is about 40x lower than ASIC, and lower budget FPGAs use older processes.
A h265 or AV1 decoder requires millions of logic gates (and DRAM memory bandwidth.) Only high-end FPGAs provide that.
There's mention that the decode could get a lot easier. Here's an H264 core that runs on older lattice chips and only takes 56k luts. https://www.latticesemi.com/products/designsoftwareandip/int... . Microchip's polarfires have a soft H.264 core as well taking under 20k. If AV2 will really be easier for hardware to implement, it might work out. Here's another example, H 264 decode in an artix 7, can do 1080p60 https://www.cast-inc.com/compression/avc-hevc-video-compress... . So with all due respect, what in the world are you talking about?
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Can a "lower budget" FPGA really outperform a consumer-grade CPU for this?
And what hobbyist is sending off decoding chips to be fabbed? If this exists, it sounds interesting if incredibly impractical.
It’s not possible on any but the largest $$$ FPGAs… and even then we often need to partition over multiple FPGAs to make it fit. And it will only run at a fraction of the target clock speed.