Info New AMD Alveo MA350 professional Media encoder card.

[Heartbreaker]

Impressive new pro media encoder card, based on Xilinx ASIC work.

Quality is a massive step up over the encoders in AMD GPUs, so hopefully eventually they integrate one of these encoder blocks.

 

[A///]

This is for high speed encoding on servers in a dc environment. We'd be lucky to get that kind of trickle down anytime in the next 5-10 years.

 

[A///]

Oh that pricing is good. I may have to pick one up myself now.

 

[Heartbreaker]

The card can encode 32 simultaneous streams using about 1 watt/stream.

If this card can do 32 streams and use hardly any power, I'd bet the silicon for one stream probably isn't that extensive.

AMD GPU Media encoders have been behind for a long time, hopefully this can be leveraged to leapfrog NVidia/Intel.

 

[Heartbreaker]

AT has a front page story on this:

AMD Announces Alveo MA35D Media Accelerator: AV1 Video Encode at 1W Per Stream

www.anandtech.com

 

[DeathReborn]

It helps being a Xilinx silicon product with an AMD badge, now AMD should try to integrate this into future GPU's.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Aren't there crypto-currencies, or online services that rent your cards to do offline video-encoding for these streaming services, and they pay you? Get a few of these cards, make ROI, then profit $$$!

 

[A///]

I'm not sure, Larry. The Xilinx AIE in it is what makes the AV1 spitout better than it could be and that is what's important. If this is as good as some of the sampled videos 've found online using this product then it'll sell like hot cakes to major dc that do on the fly encoding. It should be good for companies that also do VOD/streaming/adult media. $1,500 is cheap imo but prices used to be much higher back in the day.

I'd love to see this compared to high quality software encoding in front of me vs a video.

 

[soresu]

I'd love to see this compared to high quality software encoding in front of me vs a video.

I'd imagine that it will be decent enough for low end streaming, but not great unless you are splurging on bandwidth.

To get 32 streams at once you will probably need to sacrifice some quality by yeeting higher precision motion estimation, and advanced encoding features like rate distortion optimisation or AV1 film grain modelling.

The Xilinx AIE in it is what makes the AV1 spitout better than it could be

I've seen press release somewhere that implies it was already in the works before the AMD acquisition completed.

Also you can probably do everything the AIE can do with RDNA or CDNA CUs, just not as efficiently in area or power, as the AIE seems to be yet another dedicated inference engine to add to the growing huge variety of this accelerator type.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Too rich for my blood, but it would be nice if this trickled down to consumer and lower end cards. I'm using nvidia T400 in my plex server, but in traditional nvidia manner it's hardware gimped at only 2GB of VRAM and software gimped at only 3 streams. Would be nice to have some low power low profile alternative from AMD.

 

[A///]

To get 32 streams at once you will probably need to sacrifice some quality by yeeting higher precision motion estimation, and advanced encoding features like rate distortion optimisation or AV1 film grain modelling.

it isn't about the total batch size but how it'll process a few streams very fast and at a low power usage. this kind of tech albeit dated in the past has existed to a degree but at ahigher intro cost available for live transcoding. question is if a regular shmo like myself can buy it and i might need a ws or home server orientated platform.