Video encoding is a critical cloud technology used to compress videos to reduce network & storage requirements. To evaluate video encoding performance, we use libx264 which implements the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard, the most widely used today.

Ampere Altra Cloud Native Processors lead in performance for popular cloud native applications while running at lower power than legacy x86 processors. With industry leading core count, power efficient SIMD units, fixed CPU frequency giving consistent performance on all cores and an highly energy efficient design are why Ampere Altra Processors are ideal for running video encoding workloads.

To evaluate x264 performance on Azure VMs with Ampere Altra, we ran “vbench: a Benchmark for Video Transcoding in the Cloud” on 16 vCPU VMs on Microsoft Azure, encoding the 15 input videos on each vCPU and measure performance throughput. Ampere Altra CPU based VMs running in Microsoft Azure have an average price-performance advantage of 130% and 115% vs. legacy x86 processors.

Performance data on Azure Public Preview as of 7/1/2022.