Tencent Cloud Says It's Mass Producing Custom Video Chips
upstart writes:
Chinese tech giant claims better performance than competing GPUs:
Chinese social media, cloud, and entertainment giant Tencent on Monday revealed that it has started mass production of a home brew video transcoding accelerator.
The announcement comes nearly two years after the company unveiled a trio of custom chips designed to accelerate everything from streaming video to networking and artificial intelligence workloads.
In a post published on WeChat, Tencent Cloud revealed that "tens of thousands" of its Canghai chips, which are designed to offload video encode/decode for latency sensitive workloads, have been deployed internally to accelerate cloud gaming and live broadcasting.
Tencent says the Canghai chip can be paired with GPUs from a variety of vendors to support low-latency game streaming. When used for video transcoding, Tencent said a single node equipped with Canghai can deliver up to 1,024 video channels . We'll note that Nvidia, with the launch of its L4 GPUs last month, made similar claims. Without real-world benchmarks, it's hard to say how either firm's claims stack up.
[...] When it comes to spinning custom chips to improve the efficiency and economics of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services gets a lot of credit. The American e-tail giant and cloud titan has developed everything from custom CPUs, AI training and inference accelerators, and smartNICs to offload many housekeeping workloads.
And while Google has developed an accelerator of its own, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), most US cloud providers have largely stuck with commercially available parts from the likes of Intel, AMD, Ampere, Broadcom, or Nvidia, rather than designing their own.
However, in China, custom chips appear to be more prevalent, with development an imperative accelerated by US sanctions that mean some tech products can't be exported to the Middle Kingdom.
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