GigaAccel 180 CELL-based video encoder

[CEATEC 2009] Here’s a CELL-based video encoding accelerator that has enough muscle to compress H.264, 1080p videos at 40fps (compression speed), which is about twice as fast as “real-time” (assuming a 24fps source), so a 1hr movie would take only 30mn to get compressed. Anyone working in broadcast would salivate over this level of performance. Now, this does not include all the edits and effects, but you get the idea: it’s a lot faster than doing it without the card… At $8000, it doesn’t come cheap and you could argue that a $500 GPU can do something pretty close, or may be better (disclaimer: I worked for a GPU company in a past life). The issue with GPUs is the software: it’s often too consumer-ish and not always up to the task for professionals (but that’s changing fast). I can’t vouch that the GigaAcell 180 would do everything that pros want, but it’s worth checking out. The good news is that better parallel computing is coming with DX11 and OpenCL, so stay tuned.