this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Can't current CPUs decode it in real time?
Yeah, because of the ASICs built into them to enable that decoding.
Without that, a 4K HEVC video is in upwards of 100+ billion operations/s to decode on the CPU. Which limits you to high end CPUs getting capped out on something you essentially get for "free" otherwise
I meant without dedicated circuits, obviously. Can't it be parallelised? Many cpus have a lot of relatively idle cores at a given time...
I remember that my 486 had trouble with mp3 files, but soon enough, I got a new machine with many more spare cycles.
That is parallelized... I didn't make mention of threading being the concern here.
The 100+ billion operations per second isn't exactly easy.
4k 60fps = 498 million pixels per second
Each pixel takes a couple hundred logical operations with HEVC.
A modern high end 4GHz, 8 physical core CPU at 4 instructions per cycle, at maximum capacity, can handle 128 billion operations per second.
You probably wouldn't even get your realtime framerate in this scenario.