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Polygon
Plex involves a lot of encoding and decoding of multimedia formats, and these can be done in software or natively in hardware. Everything defaults to software, which is CPU intensive and which is why watching 4k on devices that do this in software will mean fans spin up and get noisy, etc.
With modern CPUs, certain codecs and operations can have circuits implemented within the CPU to do that work. The difference is that if you hand the job directly to the CPU it is significantly less work overall... and even with multiple high resolution streams playing at once in Plex barely a few % of CPU is used.
Software like Plex can do the hardware offload, and it means they ask the CPU if it supports certain things... and if they do, great... don't run the software decoder and instead tell the CPU to do it in hardware.
This is the CPU in my Plex machine: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/126686/intel-core-i7-8700-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html
Note the TDP: 65W... could've got it lower but I didn't know what I was doing at the time and err'd on the side of caution by getting a slightly hotter and more capable CPU.
Also note this: "Intel® Quick Sync Video" this is the feature that is effectively the hardware encoding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
The software needs to support detecting this and interacting with it... hence Plex understands this well, as does most video and audio software precisely because of Intel's dominance... check this one feature in the CPU and gain a huge % of people it benefits.
The problem with AMD is that the support isn't as consistent or universal. AMD have had 3 different engines in the same time and not every CPU feature it, and it was already niche in the wider market. They used to have separate encoder and decoder circuits, and then combine to create something called Video Core Next (basically does the same as Intel Quick Sync Video). But as not all software knows how to look for it and may not support it... it's more of a crap shoot as to whether it will work for you.
And that CPU I use... I have it fanless, literally a huge heatsink that requires no fan is on it. One of these things (I have an earlier model) https://www.scan.co.uk/products/nofan-copper-icepipe-cpu-cooler-80w-fanless-for-all-intel-and-amd-cpus
So in my setup... low power usage (low electricity bill), totally silent (no fans), and yet very high performance (I couldn't play games on this, but I can stream a lot of high-res content).