Monday, April 25th 2022
Intel "Arctic Sound M" Enterprise Accelerator Shown Encoding AV1 Video
Intel showed off the video encode acceleration capabilities of its upcoming Data Center GPU codenamed "Arctic Sound M," which features AV1 video encode hardware-acceleration. Intel has been pushing for AV1 to be adopted as the streaming video standard for some years now, as it offers comparable bitrate savings and quality to H.265, but is royalty free, resulting in tens of millions of Dollars of royalty savings for streaming content providers such as Netflix, as well as consumer electronics manufacturers, particularly smart TV makers.
Intel's accelerator is a single-slot, full-height add-on card with a PCI-Express x16 interface. It relies on rack airflow for cooling, and features a metal-channel heatsink. Power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. There are no encoding performance numbers put out, except the 30% bitrate savings AV1 offers compared to the current industry standard, H.264. This 30% saving adds up in a big way for a streaming content provider.Intel's video presentation follows.
Intel's accelerator is a single-slot, full-height add-on card with a PCI-Express x16 interface. It relies on rack airflow for cooling, and features a metal-channel heatsink. Power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. There are no encoding performance numbers put out, except the 30% bitrate savings AV1 offers compared to the current industry standard, H.264. This 30% saving adds up in a big way for a streaming content provider.Intel's video presentation follows.
7 Comments on Intel "Arctic Sound M" Enterprise Accelerator Shown Encoding AV1 Video
Its a fair trade off in quality, the H264 looks washed out in some areas, the AV1 looks more blurry in some.
Sometime in the future for new content it may not stream VP9 for 4K resolution depending also on the view count making AV1 accelerated capable hardware a necessity in essence.
I don't know just asking, I haven't seen a roadmap regarding future YouTube requirements regarding AV1 acceleration.
I don't think that was the purpose, beating H265 I mean. The whole point of AV1 is being royalty free and doing away with closed standards. Besides, HEVC never really took off as H264 did (licensing being one of the reasons why).
Though, that aside, AV1 has been shown to beat H265 by a small margin (10-20%) in terms of compression efficiency in some tests.
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/apsipa-transactions-on-signal-and-information-processing/article/compression-efficiency-analysis-of-av1-vvc-and-hevc-for-random-access-applications/D2345DDC3750055AB0AA3D24FCF743BE