July 12, 2025

PBF Tech

Technology and Website

Google has designed a new chip to help load YouTube videos faster

Google has rolled out an internally-made chip to assistance YouTube videos glimpse better and load speedier than at any time prior to.

Termed Video clip (Trans)Coding Units, or VCUs, the chips had been in the is effective for about 50 percent a ten years as Google engineers high-quality tuned their optimization algorithms.

The new silicon has reportedly aided YouTube meet a huge spike in usage during the pandemic.

According to Google, the VCU gives users the best YouTube video clip quality feasible on their gadget without consuming up as much bandwidth as prior to, whilst serving to Google cut down infrastructure charges. 

Much more successful

In an interview on the YouTube site, Jeff Calow, a Google software engineer and one of the engineers guiding the new chip, explained Google began working on the chips quickly immediately after it first noticed a spike in demand for increased-quality videos many many years back.

To provide the videos without penalizing the viewer, Google shifted to more info-successful video clip codecs these kinds of as VP9. Having said that, VP9 essential five occasions more compute methods to encode than the widely utilised H.264 structure, which led to the corporation developing the customized silicon.

Calow pointed out that the VCU is an buy of magnitude speedier than their before transcoding option that ran on traditional processors. 

The first model of the VCU, which supports both of those VP9 and H.264 codecs, has now been rolled out throughout Google’s info facilities around the world, and provides that Google engineers are currently working on the up coming era of the VCU that supports the new and impending AV1 codec.

By using Facts Centre Expertise