Despite very good compression results the main problem of AVC is processor requirements. For me it would translate into very simple problem - SD (480p) AVC will not play on XBOX (733 MHz CPU), at least for now, untill x264 is optimized.
On the other hand, encoding into AVC is quite expensive too. The following table summarize 2 pass encoding done on different CPUs (Single pass generally could be done twice as fast).
| CPU |
Video |
Enc FPS |
MoM |
% Real |
| P3 866MHz |
20 fps |
2.137/2.034 |
19 min |
5% |
| M 1.6GHz |
20 fps |
5.967/6.551 |
6 min |
17% |
| M 1.6GHz |
20 fps (no pre proc.) |
9.318/7.740 |
5 min |
20% |
| P4 3.4 GHz |
24 fps |
11.527/10.971 |
4 min |
25% |
As could be noted even 3.4 GHz P4 CPU is about half real time for single pass encoding, which is generally in line with my earlier estimates that it would take about 5-6GHz to do SD H264 in software in real time. Also from results it is quite obvious that clock speed for Pentium-M CPU are not in line with P3/P4 CPUs performance wise and do have about 50% more performance per GHz comparing to either P3 or P4:
- Comparing M 1.6GHz to P4 3.4 GHz we could see that 112.5% clock increase yields only about 70% increase in performance.
- Comparing P3 866MHz to M 1.6GHz we could see that less then 100% clock increase yields over 160% increase in performance.