alt Hacker Newsthis is a reference decoder, not an optimized one. AV1's reference decoder couldn't do real-time on consumer hardware either, dav1d is what made it practical, and that took years after the spec. The real question is when something like dav1d-for-AV2 shows up, and whether hardware decode blocks land in the next silicon generation, until then this is a proof of spec correctness, not a deployment signal
This demonstration showed real-time video decoding using ARM Neon vector instructions on an Apple CPU at an unspecified frame rate (presumably lower than that achieved on the x86 CPU) and real-time video decoding at 1080p/24 fps, using AVX2 vector instructions on an x86 CPU.
While this is not an impressive performance (compared to 4k/60fps or better for codecs with HW suport), it is still much, much faster than the early AV1 decoders.
I believe that this was precisely the intention of this demonstration, to show that AV2 is already much more mature performance-wise than AV1 ever was in a similar point of its lifetime, as the main early complaint against AV1 was its slowness in the absence of dedicated hardware support.