For what it's worth, Intel shipped "hybrid" implementations of HEVC and VP9 for older products where the CPU does some work but the GPU's shader cores do shader-y bits (https://www.anandtech.com/show/10610/intel-announces-7th-gen...). I don't know how far that approach gets you, especially in mobile settings where you really care about power use. But you might see that before complete hardware decoders everywhere.
A use case that might be interesting before full hardware acceleration is to provide an improved still image format. The graph in the post is a great demonstration that improving video encoding and improving image encoding are closely related these days. AV1 has backing and went through IP review that may help it avoid being mired in a patent mess like previous proposals to replace JPEG. (Apple is using .heic, based on HEVC intra coding. Android'll support .heic in the next major version, but the HEVC patent situation will likely constrain how many external tools, platforms, etc. pick it up.) There's work on defining an AVIF format (https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-avif) and tech demos look great (https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/av1stilldemo/). So, maybe fewer ugly JPEG artifacts in our future, partly thanks to that deringing filter mentioned at the end of Monty's post.
There is some interesting Q&A at the end of Pascal's talk. My schoolboy French is not fast enough to do a proper translation unfortunately. He was asked about parallel (software) decoding and I think the gist was he thought it would be a bit difficult because of the dependencies between region images.
For what it's worth, Intel shipped "hybrid" implementations of HEVC and VP9 for older products where the CPU does some work but the GPU's shader cores do shader-y bits (https://www.anandtech.com/show/10610/intel-announces-7th-gen...). I don't know how far that approach gets you, especially in mobile settings where you really care about power use. But you might see that before complete hardware decoders everywhere.
A use case that might be interesting before full hardware acceleration is to provide an improved still image format. The graph in the post is a great demonstration that improving video encoding and improving image encoding are closely related these days. AV1 has backing and went through IP review that may help it avoid being mired in a patent mess like previous proposals to replace JPEG. (Apple is using .heic, based on HEVC intra coding. Android'll support .heic in the next major version, but the HEVC patent situation will likely constrain how many external tools, platforms, etc. pick it up.) There's work on defining an AVIF format (https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-avif) and tech demos look great (https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/av1stilldemo/). So, maybe fewer ugly JPEG artifacts in our future, partly thanks to that deringing filter mentioned at the end of Monty's post.
(I said more or less the stuff about stills above, with a couple more details and links, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16699000)