For the previous couple of years, Intel has had a product line generally known as the Visual Computing Accelerator (VCA). With the VCA2 product being placed on EOL earlier this 12 months, with out a substitute, we questioned the place this market of Intel’s was going to go. At Intel’s Architecture Day 2020, it could seem the corporate is about to product a brand new SG1 graphics card for the server marketplace for this goal.
Intel’s Visual Compute Accelerator
Two variations of the VCA have existed, and the {hardware} beneath was comparatively unorthodox – Intel put three of its Xeon E3 processors onto a single PCB behind a PCIe swap.
Each processor linked to its personal DRAM and chipset as properly, and the objective was to make use of the Intel Gen graphics on-board to have the ability to speed up streaming video both for consumption or gaming. These processors had the most effective model of Intel’s Iris Pro P6300/P580 GT4e graphics, together with 128 MB of L4 eDRAM and 32 GB of DRAM every – we noticed an organization that constructed VCE playing cards for Intel’s companions again at Supercomputing 2019.
Mockup of a VCA2 with lively cooling, minus aesthetics
Each VCA2 was able to transcoding 44 streams of 1080p30 H.264 concurrently, or 14 streams of 4K30 H.264. However, the second era VCA2 was placed on the EOL path earlier this 12 months, with no substitute in sight.
DG1 and SG1
Intel declared throughout Architecture Day that it’s planning three merchandise constructed on its new Xe-LP graphics structure. The firm went into some element in regards to the type of Xe-LP graphics that will likely be going into the brand new Tiger Lake pocket book processor, which would be the first model available on the market (the complete announcement of Tiger Lake is anticipated to be on September 2nd).
The different product beforehand introduced on Xe-LP was DG1: Discrete Graphics 1. This is anticipated to be the primary discrete PCIe add-in card for LP, focusing on on the low-end market. Intel has already proven the software program improvement car for DG1 at CES in January 2020, with the announcement that they had been beginning to pattern a model of the cardboard to its software program companions prematurely of a much bigger launch later within the 12 months. The card was the identical measurement of the low-to-mid vary graphics available on the market at the moment, with out a PCIe connector, indicating that it needs to be beneath 75W.
Intel’s DG1, Four of which make SG1
The third product is SG1: Server Graphics. Intel gave close to zero particulars as to the setup of SG1, nonetheless they did point out that the goal market was for video acceleration and streaming, precisely the place the VCA collection has sat. This would make it align with the mothballing of the present VCA collection later this 12 months. The VCA2 card was a GPU that had an 8-pin and a 6-pin energy connector and 3x 45W CPUs in addition to twin Ethernet outputs, so we absolutely count on SG1 to be of an analogous measurement.
Intel confirmed to us that SG1 will likely be a product containing 4 DG1 silicon dies, placed on the identical PCB. We count on there to be extra direct exterior networking connectivity and reminiscence help, and will probably be fascinating to see how the PCIe lanes are distributed and configuration will likely be. Intel has confirmed that the brand new GPU helps AVC, HEVC, MPEG2, VP9 encode/decode and AV1 decode.
