superjan parent
Arithmetic coding decodes 1 bit at a time, usually in such a way that you can’t do two bits or more with SIMD instructions. So it will be slow and energy inefficient.
Deompression is limited by memory bandwidth IME, which means that more efficient compression is (almost) always more power-efficient too.
(I don't have numbers for this, but it was generally agreed by the x264 team at one point.)
this isn't necessarily true. zstd uses an ans which is a type of arithmetic coding which is very efficient to decode
Nice to learn about. It’s good to know the field has progressed, however the context focused on JPEG, where my point does apply.