I would be very interested in seeing if they do in fact have some dedicated hardware for this.
As far as I can tell, Google for example tries to keep its custom hardware (as in custom relative to the rest of the infrastructure) very minimal.
But if Zoom or any other actor can for example implement some scalable ASIC or other dedicated form of hardware to transcode and do networking (perhaps even some encryption primitives), I could see how that would be easily done.
Then again, I'd say Google and company have enough resources to do so, just not the incentive. I don't know the details about the finances at Zoom, but I'm pretty sure it costs A LOT to handle thousands of 1000 people conferences. If they're getting paid, and they're just getting started, maybe it's worth the cost. At Google et. al., perhaps is just a matter of cost vs. revenue. But they do have MORE than enough of brains, software and hardware to do so.
As far as I can tell, Google for example tries to keep its custom hardware (as in custom relative to the rest of the infrastructure) very minimal.
But if Zoom or any other actor can for example implement some scalable ASIC or other dedicated form of hardware to transcode and do networking (perhaps even some encryption primitives), I could see how that would be easily done.
Then again, I'd say Google and company have enough resources to do so, just not the incentive. I don't know the details about the finances at Zoom, but I'm pretty sure it costs A LOT to handle thousands of 1000 people conferences. If they're getting paid, and they're just getting started, maybe it's worth the cost. At Google et. al., perhaps is just a matter of cost vs. revenue. But they do have MORE than enough of brains, software and hardware to do so.