Thursday, April 21, 2011

YouTube Videos are now transcoded into WebM

To deliver great content, regardless of device, browser or other technical specification, so you never have to remember that complicated “power adapter converter” to watch a video.
To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.

Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog - nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day - this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.
 
In keeping with our goal of making videos universally accessible, we will continue to support H.264 as an important codec for video on YouTube. We are also committed to continuing to develop our HTML5 video player that we announced last year, and if you’d like to join the opt-in trial, you can do so here.
 
The world of online video is incredibly complex and dynamic. Yet, our goal is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the great content you’ve always enjoyed. We’ll continue to invest in new video technology that improves the experiences for all users, builds a better infrastructure for online video, leads to greater access of information and spurs continued innovation.
 

Friday, April 15, 2011

Intel Xeon processor E7 New 10-Core

Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that the new processors will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It's been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural efficiency, these new Xeons are more balanced. The new chips boost the core count to ten (up to 20 threads with HT enabled) and will be offered at a wide range of TDPs.

"Intel has been changing the economics for mission-critical computing server deployments for more than a decade, and today we are raising the bar yet again," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. "The new Intel Xeon processor E7 family delivers record breaking performance with powerful new security, reliability and energy efficiency enhancements. The industry momentum we're seeing for this new server processor architecture is unparalleled in Intel's history. The days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architectures for mission-critical applications are nearing an end."
Intel's presentation made it clear that it's gunning for what's left of the RISC market. Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, made a point of telling the conference that there's "No workload in the world today that Xeon can't handle." History certainly favors his words. Intel's quoted figures indicate that while the high end of the server market grew just five percent from 2002-2010, Intel's share of it nearly doubled.

The company went out of its way to note that Itanium's share of the market grew enormously over the past eight years, but it's Xeon, not Poulson, Intel is betting on. The new E7 series incorporates the benefits of Sandy Bridge, its support for new instructions, and its improved power management technology. Intel has also baked in support for low-voltage DIMMs, which allows vendors to opt for 1.35v products. The power savings, at 1W per DIMM, might not sound like much, but the E7 series supports up to 2TB of RAM in a 4S system. According to Intel, low-voltage DDR3 can cut a server's power consumption by up to 128W.

OEM support for the new E7 processors seems downright enthusiastic; 19 vendors have announced a total of 35 systems with shipping to begin immediately. This may be partly due to the way the E7 helps to simplify Intel's product mix. Up to now, Intel's heavy-hitting Beckton was a 45nm chip that lacked the 32nm enhancements of the Xeon 5600 parts.