- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
It's complicated. Basically, Skylake only supports 8 bit HEVC fully in hardware. This is basically, no h265 video you can find online, ever. 10 bit is pretty much the standard if you go pirating h265 stuff. This skylake only supports in a "hybrid/partital" configuration. Apparently this "hybrid decoding" is suported in linux decoding only for Broxton. I remember this because somebody handed me down a Fujitsu tablet similar to this Thinkpad one, just with Skylake SoC instead of Kabylake and I noticed hardware decoding didn't work for most of my movies. The biggest distinction for Kabylake is basically the iGPU supporting the modern stuff, video-wise, with full en/decoding support. I don't think anything bigger Skylake era seriously struggles doing software decoding, but these small, 4.5-5W TDP mobile SoCs, they do, depending. They need that hardware support.
Streaming websites like Netflix by the way will only give you 720p at best on Linux, with no hardware acceleration, because widevine and friends don't consider Linux a "safe" system (yes, they have safety triers, basically goes after how easy it is to rip videos on the OS in question from what I could gather). Don't allow DRM on your computer, folks.
Yeah, you can't orient yourself after prices either because it's all kinda compressed in between 50-200 bucks for systems that have often dramatically different performance and accessories.
Another cool option to look out for in the intel almost-retrocomputing department would be the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro, as a libreboot image exists for it. If you then rip out most of ME via me_cleaner, you have a system that's somewhat less of a botnet than the rest, while being a lot more palpable in the performance department than some ancient core2duo Thinkpad. I only learned about this recently and I might actually be interested in such a system.
I used to have an AMD A4-5000 as workstation for the longest time plus a headless Ryzen "server" with GPU I'd stream more demanding programs from via VirtualGL or just plain old X forwarding. It worked really well even for rather fast-paced video games. I'd like to get back to such a setup with the help of hardware accelerated video streaming. I had written a small C client/server utilizing uinput for input and output (basically a software KVM switch) and also piped alsa over the network.
ARM would be perfect for the low power workstation, the problem is that the combination hardware video decoding&mainline Linux simply doesn't exist. I saw sunshine/moonlight but they seem very convoluted. I played around a bit with ffmpeg decoding/capture and got the latency down quite far but it wasn't really a seamless thing. Some day I need to return to that. Seeing that there are very powerful SoCs in the 35W TDP range, I'm not sure it's truly worth it to go through all that effort, although it would be cool to have sort of a "distributed desktop" spread over different computers, seamlessly.
The only way these are going to really be a buying reason would be if anything AI related becomes such a legal minefield for the private customer that using APIs will be a safety concern. I don't quite see that right now. I used to buy into the newest computing trends that were obsolute six months later in the 90s. This time I'll leave the younger generation to it.
I wanted to replace my aging RX580 but I simply don't play enough eyecandy videogames anymore and these new GPUs give me pause in the power consumption department.
