One of Intel’s extra fascinating merchandise over the current years was its vary of Visual Compute Accelerator playing cards, designed to assist cloud streaming and encoding/decoding of HD and UHD video. These playing cards had been constructed on the QuickSync precept, utilizing Intel’s built-in graphics to speed up the method, but in addition utilizing particular Xeons with added eDRAM (often known as Crystalwell) to assist speed up the method. These playing cards match right into a PCIe 3.zero x16 slot, and used a swap to manage them, in addition to shuttling knowledge throughout the PCIe bus. They had been launched in 2017, and now Intel is placing them onto the End-Of-Life monitor for product discontinuance.
These playing cards had been geared in direction of the cloud video streaming market, and contained three E3-1585L v5 processors inside with Iris Pro P580 graphics. The card as a complete was rated for 235 W, which incorporates the swap inside, and thru a number you may ssh into the CPUs just like how Intel made Xeon Phi add-in playing cards. Intel’s SDK pacakages for the cardboard revolved round AVC transcoding at 30 FPS, in addition to a Kernel growth package for CAD functions.
We truly noticed a 3rd get together firm at Supercomputing this 12 months who constructed the playing cards particularly for HPE’s buyer deployments. They had been displaying off the PCB routing and cooling abilities. The card was fairly heavy and lengthy, requiring an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCIe connector to offer sufficient energy.
The EOL timeline for the VCA1585LMV begins on May 22nd, with a ultimate order date of August 1st. Orders are non-cancelable after September 1st, and all orders will likely be shipped by the top of the 12 months. Any orders positioned between the ultimate order date and the ultimate cargo date will likely be stuffed by any current stock. Interestingly sufficient, Intel additionally contains this snippet in its product discover that I’ve by no means seen earlier than:
- Intel will present cheap industrial efforts in debugging points throughout the guarantee interval for the product after the PDA date has handed. Fixes can’t be dedicated, however Intel will endeavor to offer cheap workarounds for the product.
At this cut-off date Intel has not said if it plans to launch a brand new model of the Visual Compute Accelerator – on condition that VCA2 is now in EOL and no VCA3 is introduced, this line of merchandise has doubtless completed, or will likely be changed by future AI/Xe/FPGA efforts.
Source: Intel PCN 117586-00, Intel Product Page, Intel Server Marketing Library
