The way things are going, we can pretty much forget about AV2 hardware encoders in PCs anytime soon. All the newest, best chip capacity is being completely hogged by Apple and AI companies.
Unless chipmakers port the AV2 design to older, cheaper nodes, it’s just not happening for average users. We’ll probably see some Chinese TV chip makers throw in an AV2 decoder just to check a box, but as an actual encoder? I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic, Intel and AMD aren't going to stop making CPUs, and if their integrated graphics adds AV2 it will be motivation enough for others to follow.
Ram and Ssd is just the start capitalism dictates profits will suck all production to AI. CPu have 3-5 year production timeline ie cpu prices will start going up a lot more as previous production contracts expire you might even get shortages new consumer cpus won't be affordable or spread as fast as you think.
PCs don’t need hardware encoders. There are no realtime jobs on these. You can let it encode in however long it takes.
You need hardware encoders for things like cameras because they need to encode in real time since the buffer would quickly overflow otherwise.
Use cases for hardware encoders in PCs:
- Video calls
- Screen/webcam recording
- Live streaming
- Real-time transcoding for media servers (don’t know much about this but I’ve heard it’s a thing)
- Game streaming
- Video editing (making exporting less frustrating)
Everything here is really niche, except video calls (and even that...).
In other words, unless on smart phones, don't expect broadly distributed AV2 encoding hardware.
If it does happen on PC, it will be most likely some courtesy of the hardware chip designers.
Screen recording is not niche, anyone who works remotely probably does video calls daily and the others are somewhat more niche but I'd guess that at least 50-70% of people do at least one of these things
Video calls are niche, and offline encoding of video isn't?
Are you sure this isn't just “things I do are commonplace, and things I don't are incredibly niche”?