AVX-512 support for Transcoding

[unibeta 7]

Is there any hope that Xeon CPU systems will receive AVX-512 support for transcoding in the foreseeable future?

There seems to be a lot of work going on at FFmpeg, but I don't know if it will be usable by Emby.

 

Greeting unibeta

[Luke 42080]

Hi, if ffmpeg supports it then yes we should be able to use it. Thanks !

[Waldonnis 148]

There's been some discussion about AVX-512 recently in the x265 thread on doom9, actually.  I don't think any work has been done in that encoder yet to include any of the AVX-512 feature sets, but I don't follow the commit logs and could've missed something.  I know the x264 folks have been talking about it too, but I haven't been following that side of things lately either.

 

Be sure your cooling is good, as using those instruction sets has a definite thermal impact and may lead to throttling if the cooling can't handle the additional load (something several noticed with SL-X, and CL doesn't look to be much different).

[unibeta 7]

Thanks for the feedback.

The CPU of the NAS might be too weak, but in my case this is currently running Hyper-V on two Xeon Gold 6126.

Of course not for Emby, the server has other things to do during the day but in the evening it can be useful for Emby..... :-)

Currently, the system with 6 virtual cores for 4K materials is reaching its performance limit. Unfortunately, I can't use GPU in the server, so I hoped that the AVX-512 function could provide some relief....

[Waldonnis 148]

At least Xeon cores are usually clocked lower, so throttling and temps shouldn't be as bad as the desktop processors.  Using fewer cores should make it even less of a concern.  Like you, though, I'm also curious to see how the performance works out once AVX-512 is introduced on the encoder side.  I'm considering a hardware upgrade anyway and if it proves to be a reasonable performance boost, I may look into a new case and better cooling solutions as well.