Intel Arctic Sound M data center GPU: Support AV1 video encoding

Intel Arctic Sound M data center GPU: Support AV1 video encoding

Intel has been promoting AV1 as a mainstream streaming video format in recent years. Compared with H.265, it saves bit rate and has better quality, and it still does not require royalties.

In fact, many mainstream video sites have already Start serving video in AV1 format. Intel’s new DG2 architecture graphics card has added the encoding function to AV1 format.

At present, NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards do not have this function.

As for the decoding function, Intel’s own Xe architecture core display already provides decoding of AV1 format video.

This feature is also available on the latest graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD.

At the 2022 investor conference, Intel demonstrated the code-named Arctic Sound M data center GPU, which has video encoding capabilities in the AV1 format. It is used for video transcoding.

Intel calls it a media supercomputer, Arctic Sound M. It can transcode 8 4K video streams at the same time, or 30 1080p video streams, which may be used in video websites or game streaming services.

This Arctic Sound M is a single-slot full-height accelerator card, which contains a DG2 GPU with 128 sets of EU, uses a PCI-E 4.0 x16 slot, and has a single 8pin power supply port at the rear. Fan, which relies on the airflow of the chassis to dissipate heat.

The performance data of this card has not been released yet, but Intel has shown the video bit rate comparison between AV1 and H.264 format.

Under the same video quality, the video bit rate of AV1 is 44.9Mb/s, while that of H.264 format is 64.7Mb/s, saving 30% of the traffic, no matter for the user or the service provider, this saves a lot of traffic.