VCUs seem like an excellent solution for this problem and I'm actually surprised they didn't opt to build custom hardware for this earlier on. I wonder if other video companies will hop onto this and start releasing their own VCUs. I imagine this kind of hardware could be very useful for any video streaming site as well as people who edit videos all day (Hollywood etc.)<p>The article didn't really go into technical details, so would anyone happen to know why a VCU happens to be faster than a traditional GPU? I thought the point of building GPU kernels was supposed to be able to speed up tasks like this (doing the same set of steps over millions of different inputs).
TLDR: YouTube is creating custom video encoding hardware to lower costs.<p>This part is just a lie, however, given YouTube frequently practices censorship of political views and ideologies their employees disagree with:<p>> Our mission is “To give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Let anyone upload a video to show anyone else in the world, for free.<p>This seems like the same gaslighting we saw recently with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki receiving an award for free expression sponsored by YouTube itself: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26880262" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26880262</a>