40 cores? This thing will be dazzling.

Adding a bunch of tiny cores to an SOC is easy. What’s much harder is writing the software to make use of them.

Nah, that's pretty easy if you do anything involving video. AV1 will eat all the cores.

Not quite that simple: Using AOM AV1, a 12-core Ryzen 5900X beats a 128-core dual EPYC 7763 (same Zen3 architecture) in every encoding benchmark, according to https://openbenchmarking.org/

You have to be smart about how you process the video.

Yes, if you just use AOM directly you'll have a hard time saturating the core with work.

However, if you split your video up into scenes and start an AOM instance per scene, it becomes trivial to outperform the 12 core ryzen with a 128 core machine. The main bottleneck becomes memory bandwidth.

This is what the av1an project is doing https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an

All that said, you need videos long enough for there to be a benefit here. The Ryzen will still win if you are talking about making 10 second av1 gifs.