Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, April 6 (Xinhua)-- in 2020, Cyrus released its first "all-in-one SmartNIC (Intelligent Network Card) platform"-the Alveo U25 data center acceleration card, which integrates network, storage and computing acceleration functions on a single device.

As a successor to the Xilinx Alveo series, AMD today launched a new data center dedicated accelerator card-Alveo MA35D. Like the Alveo U30, MA35D is a pure video coding card designed for data centers and has provided samples to its partners.

To put it simply, the latest generation of Alveo accelerator cards have significant performance advantages over their predecessors, achieving four times the maximum simultaneous video stream (simultaneous video streams), while adding AV1 and 8K resolution coding support.

The main customers of this accelerator card are live media services and other interactive video services (such as live streaming, cloud games, video conferencing, etc.), all of which require real-time simultaneous encoding of a large number of video streams in the server environment.

The company expects shipments of the new product to start in the third quarter of this year at a reference price of $1595 (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 10974 yuan).

Back to the Alveo MA35D hardware itself, the previous generation of Alveo U30 only supports H.264 and H.265 encoding, which can encode up to 8 1080p streams, while Alveo MA35D expands to 32 1080p streams, while adding support for the latest generation of AV1 codecs, and the maximum resolution has been increased from 4K to 8K.

The core of the card is AMD's unnamed video coding ASIC, which they call the Video processing Unit (VPU).

It is reported that MA35D consists of two vpu parts, each vpu has a 8GB LPDDR5 chip and is connected to the processor through PCIe 5.0x4. It is worth mentioning that the VPU here is based on the 5nm process, but it is strange that AMD did not disclose the foundry, so we think it may be Samsung 5nm process.

Each VPU section contains four video coding blocks and adds various accessory blocks needed to make it a full-function chip, of which two full-function blocks support H.264, H.265 and AV1, while the other two are only suitable for AV1.

In addition, the VPU also includes a video decoder module for transcoding, a memory controller, a management controller, a bit rate scaler, a combination engine and a 22 TOPS throughput AI processor to further improve the video coding quality of the card.

Energy efficiency is another major advantage over older U30 cards, which AMD believes is also an important advantage in their competition. The official TDP of the card is 50 watts, but in fact AMD found that the typical power consumption of the card is close to 35 watts, or slightly more than 1W per stream in the case of 1080p60. Compared with U30, this data stream consumes 66% less energy, while U30 consumes slightly more than 3W for a single 1080p data stream.

At the same time, the new MA35D and its VPU are an AI accelerator block. Unlike GPU-based products, this is not a quasi-related artificial intelligence task such as image recognition; instead, AMD is using AI accelerators to feed additional data into their video encoders to further improve coding quality, which uses a RISC-V design and AI processors are rated at 22 TOPS.

Compared with the previous generation U30, energy efficiency is another advantage of this accelerator card. The TDP of the card is only 50 watts, but in fact the typical power consumption is about 35 watts, while in the case of 1080p 60 frames, it is slightly more than 1W. Compared with U30, this figure is fully reduced by 66%.

The card can be powered entirely through PCIe slots, using only the PCIe x8 connector (each VPU is assigned to x4), and the MA35D uses passive heat dissipation.

Unlike GPU-based products, AMD is using AI accelerators to enter additional data into their video encoders to further improve coding quality. The AI processor here has a performance of 22 TOPS, and you can evaluate the stream frame by frame, and then use this analysis to adjust the coding parameters used by the rest of the chip.

In addition, AMD Alveo MA35D has relatively aggressive image quality requirements. According to AMD, MA35D can provide the same image quality as the Alveo U30 at 55% bit rate (1.8 times higher efficiency) in H.264 mode.

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