> As but one example: media encoding is pretty close to being "embarrassingly parallel" in principle
Which part? 90% of what you're doing is context or inter-frame dependent. Video encoders that live on graphics cards today use dedicated ASIC hardware.
> You can divide the video into chunks and encode the chunks in parallel
You can do this with zlib too (zlib divides a file up into 64k chunks). Doesn't mean that zlib is well-suited for GPUs, nor is each chunk "embarrassingly parallel". Neither Netflix post talks about using the GPU at all.
Which part? 90% of what you're doing is context or inter-frame dependent. Video encoders that live on graphics cards today use dedicated ASIC hardware.