Intel Announces Second Generation of Visual Compute Accelerator

During the NAB 2017 event, Intel announced a revamped version of the Visual Computer Accelerator, thus becoming the second generation of the platform for workloads with HD and UHD videos.

In a nutshell, the Visual Compute Accelerator 2 (VCA 2) was designed with the purpose of creating highly seamless transcoding of UHD content in real time, but also ultra high resolution and live virtual reality experiences, while reducing resource spending.

The closest Intel has created to a discrete GPU

Although it seems that the Visual Compute Accelerator 2 is a graphics card, the truth is that it is not. Intel has equipped this single board with three Xeon E3-1500 v5 (Skylake) processors and P580 Iris Pro graphics, capable of playing content in 4K resolution. This same graphics card is also used in Intel's Skull Canyon mini-PC, which is aimed at gaming.

The CPUs themselves operate at a base speed of 3.0 GHz, although they can reach 3.7 GHz using Turbo Boost mode. On the other hand, the board connects to some PCI-Express 3.0 slots, although it is not made to be used as a processor or GPU of a PC, and in fact it cannot be bought in stores but will only be sold to device manufacturers. and servers.

Finally, note that the VCA 2 brings support for SO-DIMM memory modules (2 channels per CPU and up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM for each CPU), while power consumption could be around 200W.

As we said above, Visual Compute Accelerator 2 will not be sold to the general public, but will come integrated in hardware such as the Haivision KB 4K decoder, which is the first partner to have announced a product with this platform.

Although VCA 2 is considered a solution for decoding and encoding 4K video in real time, it is essentially a server within a server and can be used for any cloud-based service that interests you, from gaming servers to secure remote desktops.

For now, neither the price nor the availability date of the Visual Compute Accelerator 2 is known.