In context: The world video market is now dominated by stay streaming providers, and content material suppliers want {hardware} infrastructure that may effectively handle these providers at scale. AMD is bringing a brand new purpose-built chip to those corporations.
AMD formally launched a brand new graphics product for the info heart market: the Alveo MA35D is a media accelerator based mostly on a devoted ASIC structure with a video processing unit (VPU) designed for high-density, “extremely” low-latency media streaming on-site. In AMD’s view, the Alveo MA35D ought to carry important advantages to new low-latency streaming purposes whereas lowering infrastructure prices.
The Alveo MA35D’s VPU is designed to “speed up all the video pipeline,” AMD stated. The PCIe board can carry out all video processing duties inside a devoted VPU, minimizing information transfers between the CPU and the accelerator. As a outcome, general latency is considerably decrease and channel density may be maximized, managing as much as 32 1080p60, eight 4Kp60 or 4 8Kp30 streams per card.
Compared to the earlier era (Alveo U30), the Alveo MA35D board delivers as much as 4x the channel density and as much as 4x the 4K latency, with 1.8x the compression effectivity, whereas reaching the identical VMAF rating, based on AMD. VMAF is a generally used, goal, full-reference video high quality metric developed by Netflix.
AMD’s new media platform helps right this moment’s hottest video codecs (H.264 and H.265), whereas supporting the next-generation AV1 codec, which may cut back bit charges by as much as 52%, leading to important bandwidth financial savings for a similar Perceived video high quality. According to Matt Frost, head of the Alliance for Open Media, the brand new Alveo MA35D add-on card is a crucial step in constructing a “mature ecosystem to help royalty-free, high-definition video gadgets, services and products.”
Following the most recent expertise tendencies, the Alveo MA35D additionally provides an built-in AI processor designed to enhance high quality of expertise with decrease bandwidth. An “clever video pipeline” enabled by the AI unit constantly evaluates content material “body by body” to dynamically regulate encoder settings and enhance perceived visible high quality whereas minimizing bitrate.
AMD says the Alveo MA35D is designed to assist corporations maximize the variety of lanes per server whereas minimizing energy consumption and bandwidth per stream. A 1U rack server with 8 playing cards can ship as much as 256 channels of 1080p60 (32 streams of 1080p60 per card) at 1 watt per stream, delivering important effectivity per server, rack or information heart.
AMD stated the Alveo MA35D media accelerator is presently sampling, with first shipments anticipated within the third quarter. The platform comes with an entire “Advanced Media Acceleration” suite, an open supply software program growth equipment (SDK) supporting in style video frameworks similar to FFmpeg and Gstreamer, and a C API for absolutely customized video pipelines.
