Real men have transcoders, ask Google

 Left H.264, right VPG—YouTube   ASICS beat GP chips which beat software—it’s the law. When it comes to fixed-function operations like transcoding that’s especially true. The first transcoding work was done in software on the CPU. It was pretty good and easy to see it would scale with CPU clock rate. Transcoding is a highly redundant operation and so it came to make sense for the parallel processors in a GPU to take over. They were an order of magnitude faster than CPUs. As the demand for transcoding began to explode in the early 2000s, Intel reacted and added its