Video Core Next


Video Core Next is AMD's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. It is a family of hardware accelerator designs for encoding and decoding video, and is built into AMD's graphics processing units since Raven Ridge, released January 2018.

Background

Video Core Next is AMD's successor ASIC to both the Unified Video Decoder and Video Coding Engine designs, which are hardware accelerators for video decoding and encoding, respectively. It can be used to decode, encode and transcode video streams, for example, a DVD or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone. Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Video Core Next is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This application-specific integrated circuit design allows for much more power-efficient video processing.

Support

Video Core Next supports: MPEG2 Decode, MPEG4 Decode, VC-1 Decode, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Encode/Decode, HEVC Encode/Decode, and VP9 Decode.
VCN 2.0 is implemented with Navi products. The feature set remains the same as VCN 1.0. Linus Torvalds suggests it's possibly an internal iteration related to how buffers and registers are handled in the GPU.
VCN 3.0 is implemented with Navi 2 products.