It’s not very normal to see a processor inside a graphics card, although many of you will remember the Intel Xeon Phi that were on sale a few years ago. Well, a user got access to the Intel VCA 2, a card that can in principle remember a graphics card. However, it packs three Intel Xeon processors. What is this graphics card and what was it used for?
We must clarify that this is not a new product, as the Intel VCA2 was launched in 2016. It is a hardware designed to perform high-speed video encoding and decoding. To do this, they combined the speed of an Intel Core processor with the video decoder of the integrated graphics card. To date, the company headed by Pat Gelsinger uses its graphics cards under the name ARCTIC SOUND for this task. The Intel VCA 2 was not sold for the home PC market. This is why seeing images of them is rare.
Your target market is data centers. Whether to provide video access to multiple clients, in a cloud computing service. Accelerate Cloud Gaming or for real-time video transcoding. Today there are much more elegant solutions and not just in the form of graphics cards dedicated to this task. Otherwise, we can talk, for example, about the VPUs that Google uses for its YouTube servers. In general, it is a type of material that has evolved in recent years. Thanks to the use of domain-specific processors, which are much more suitable than using a full CPU.
Intel VCA 2, the card for video transcoding with 3 Xeon
Thanks to the der8auer channel, we were able to learn about the existence of an Intel graphics card for servers and data centers with a very particular nature. We already refer Intel VCA 2 Discontinued. What at first glance appears to be a graphics card with one or more GPUs as the main processor. As well as its VRAM memory. However, after disassembly, it can be seen that this is not the case.
At first glance, it may seem like a simple graphics card of the lot due to its shape. But it’s to dismantle it and end up with a less curious plate. As you can see from the photos, includes three Intel Xeon E-1585L V5 processors. This processor four cores and eight threads is based on the SkyLake architecture, and his The TDP is 45W. Which tells us that this is a processor for laptops. What is confirmed by the dTwo SO-DIMM type slots supporting up to 64GB DDR4 per CPU. For intercommunication between the three processors, and with the PCIe 3.0 x16 interfaceuse is made of a PLX chipset.
Regarding the technical capabilities of the device, it supports up to 44 simultaneous streams in real time. Under what conditions? Resolution Full HD and H.264 codec. Instead, if the resolution is 4K, the number of video streams is reduced to 14 under the same video encoding. At least one curious piece of hardware.
