People everywhere in the encoding world have been telling us that our coverage of the GPU based encoding, led by Elemental, is flawed and that really what is required is an ASIC, a specialist chip that only does encoding. The primary reason is that encoding using HEVC in 4K is going to require about 10 times the processing of existing top end HD today and that this will drive GPUs so hard the metal would almost melt. At least that’s what we are told.
ASICs only may be how most people view encoding, although some other companies have a hybrid strategy and this week Ericsson told us of the first customer for its own specialist encoding chip, in the form of Prime Media Group, a broadcaster in Australia. Ericsson was very vocal when HEVC first came out, claiming it had the first chip that could encode to that standard, then launched its own systems built around its own chip, and now it says it has a customer for it.
But in the relationship that Elemental has with Nvidia, and with its penchant for using general purpose Amazon EC2 cloud servers, which include the leading Nvidia GPU as standard, the small US company seems to have stolen a march on the entire encoding industry. It managed to cut 50% from the bandwidth of any given video quality using HEVC, demonstrated this live at a variety of shows and signed customers. It has also used the same Nvidia chips to drive 4K in real time using HEVC as it used for its previous generation codecs. If it manages to get a 5 times uplift, that has to be good.
While that’s the benefit of using GPUs, the downside is the power requirement and the electricity needs of the Amazon EC2 are already fairly legend. So while much of the encoding industry waits for Ambarella to come out with an HEVC 4K ASIC chip (it has never said it will), Elemental is winning many of the immediate design wins, but was also waiting, we suspect, for this new Nvidia chip, which might also use less power for each cycle, in order to answer its own critics.
So while there are many constituencies that will be pleased with a new Nvidia chip, Elemental must be dancing in the aisles with a new flapghisp GPU coming out of its partner this week, announced at Siggraph.
It is the Nvidia Quadro K6000 GPU (the K stands for Kepler), which it claims is the fastest and most capable GPU ever built, delivering five times more compute performance and double the graphics capability of its predecessor. It also says it has the world’s largest and fastest graphics memory.
Pixar was among the companies that were singing its praises on the release, talking about the next generation of real-time lighting and geometry handling and thanking its stars that it had its hands on it ahead of launch. As one of Nvidia’s investments we know that Elemental will have had its hands on the chip early as well.
The Quadro K6000 GPU has 12GB ultra-fast GDDR5 graphics memory and uses 2,880 streaming multiprocessor cores. There is no way of knowing how much faster this wil perform encoding, but it is bound to help the edge that Elemental has had recently.
The Nvidia Quadro K6000 will be available in fall from Dell, HP, Lenovo and other major workstation providers so it’s just a matter of time before it makes its way into the encoding wars.
Elemental said in reponse, ‘The K6000 is based on GK110 which is the same as the Tesla K20. We don’t disclose what GPUs we utilize in our systems specifically. But we default to Tesla which are the Nvidia professional grade.’
Meanwhile Ericsson’s says that its AVP 4000 compression platform can offer up to Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV) on all codecs, except HEVC, which is perhaps not ready quite yet.