Arm-based Cloud Instances Outperform x86 Instances by up to 64% on VP9 Encoding

By Arm Ltd

November 7, 2023

Video streaming is a key cloud application that attracts intensive attention from the whole industry. It is worth noting that COVID-19 global pandemic has shown a clear impact to video industry trends and challenges. For instance, according to the research report from bitmovin[1], live-streaming at scale and low latency have become the top two areas for innovation, while video quality is also a top concern.

To adapt to this trend and meet new customer requirements, such as lower latencies, higher resolution, higher bit-depth, etc., popular video codecs have evolved from x264 to x265, VP9, and AV1. In particular, VP9 has been widely deployed in production, which occupies 17% in live-streaming and 10% in VoD encoding [1]. Compared with x264, VP9 is believed to provide better compression efficiency, enabling higher video quality at lower bit rates, which is particularly beneficial for streaming services and users with limited bandwidth [2].

To better enable customers to deploy VP9 on increasingly popular Arm-based cloud servers, Arm, together with its partner VectorCamp, have contributed numerous open-sourced optimization work and achieved significant performance improvements. These improvements are mainly achieved by leveraging Arm Neon technology [5], an advanced SIMD architecture extension for Arm processors, from 2021-2023.

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