Canada’s NetInt Technologies has announced what it claims is the first hardware AV1 encoder design to be commercially available. Designed for the data center, the ASIC is looking to tap nascent demand for AOMedia’s next-gen codec, but market skepticism over the status licensing of AV1 remains.
The arrival of Sisvel, an intellectual property management firm, into the AV1 patent equation put the kibosh on the idea that AV1 would be completely royalty free, despite the lamentations of AOMedia. We have covered Qualcomm’s lack of interest in the codec too, while LCEVC developer V-Nova has been a strong critic of the royalty-free badging, and it seems that AV1 has properly succumbed to the royalty wars, despite the intentions of its backers.
Looking back to HEVC (H.265), we can see that MIT researchers were showing off the first hardware encoders in the same year the standard was finalized – 2013. Ericsson was demonstrating its SVP 5500 encoder at IBC in 2012, the year before, and sure, the comparison isn’t quite so direct, because this industry has now fully embraced the cloud for these sorts of workloads.
But nonetheless, it seems like bad news that the first commercial hardware-based transcoder has appeared in 2021, some two to three years after AV1 was finalized, depending on how you count it. Chips&Media announced the WAVE517 IP in April 2020, as the first claimed real-time AV1 decoder, yet it seems significant that there was about a year’s gap between the decoder and the encoder being first launched.
You can see this same sort of delay in VVC, in fairness. Perhaps HEVC was something of an outlier, but 2020 saw no VVC hardware launched commercially. Software encoders and decoders were expected in Q3 and Q4, according to Fraunhofer, and Ateme and SES carried out a VVC demo for satellite TV.
However, Broadcom had launched a set top chip in 2014, and it seems rather unlikely that we’re going to see a VVC set top chip appear in 2021 at this rate. Qualcomm does expect commercial VVC this year, for what that’s worth.
Returning to the NetInt announcement, its hardware specifications say that the Codensity G5 ASIC is going to be housed inside the second-generation of NetInt’s transcoders – specifically, the Quadra T1, Quadra T2, and Quadra T4. The units are an add-in card, available in both 2.5-inch U.2 NVMe and PCIe interfaces, to suit your choice of server.
Both Intel and AMD x86 are supported, and NetInt also makes sure to mention that ARM-based servers are also being targeted by its new offerings. NetInt seems to be positioning these as the next step in an upgrade path, rather than as something worth throwing the whole server rack out for. This is important, as an ASIC is going to have to be replaced if the underlying codec changes significantly.
Mark Donnigan, a spokesperson for NetInt and business development consultant (formerly VP of Marketing at Beamr), explained that the underlying server hardware is essentially just a dual socket system, to provide enough PCI lanes to accommodate a fully loaded server chassis, with as little as 16 GB of system RAM. All the required memory and storage is housed on the Quadra cards, meaning that the server load is minimal.
This allows for flexibility that Donnigan says is much appreciated by NetInt customers. You don’t have to overhaul your server farms, and instead can just install as many Quadra cards as you need. Some shade may have been thrown, as Donnigan stressed that this avoids the rip and replace that you face when using black box fixed function encoders. “Our experience is that once a service ‘gets this fact,’ the sales process closes, and implementation accelerates since the actual work needed to upgrade an infrastructure is minimal. Yet, the benefits are huge,” he said.
As for performance, NetInt is claiming a 10x density improvement, compared to software encoders, and a 20x reduction in energy consumption compared to CPU-based workflows. In true fashion, no examples are given in the announcement, but the idea is that you can pack more of these ASICs into a given unit of space than you could if you were trying to use just Intel Xeon CPUs in a rack. Donnigan said that the density claims are outlined in a white paper, and are a general comparison with CPU-based software implementations.
The Quadra T1 houses a single Codensity G5 ASIC, in the U.2 NVMe formfactor. NetInt claims this can handle four live 4K streams, at 60 frames per second (fps), at broadcast quality with 10-bit color. The Quadra T2, as you might have guessed, houses two of the new ASICs, this time in a PCIe card formfactor – HHHL, to be precise.
Unsurprisingly, the T2 can do double what the T1 can, in terms of streams. The T4 houses four ASICs, to support 16 of these streams, and is in the full-fat PCIe slot. It’s all rather linear, but you don’t want surprises or quirks when trying to plan such deployments. As for availability, NetInt says you can buy the new range in Q2, and you can already reserve an evaluation unit.
Based on the T4, you could fit 8 of these cards in a 4U server. This would provide 128 AV1 streams per 4U, and at 60 frames per second, that brings you to the 7,680 fps that NetInt throws around in the announcement. If you want to do Full HD, you can managed 64 streams per Quadra T4. Donnigan added that you can also manage 8K on one of these, and if you really wanted to, you could go down to 136×128 resolutions too.
If you want to transcode HEVC (H.265) or AVC (H.264), NetInt’s T400 Series claims up to four 4K streams at 60 fps, via the T432 Massif add-in card. These don’t support AV1, but this is not surprising, as you need a shiny new ASIC design to do that. To that end, they are based on the fourth-generation Codensity G4 design.
The EdgeFusion E408 is an interesting product, and speaks to the need for video processing outside the data center. As the name implies, this is aimed at the network edge, and essentially combines SSD-based storage and encoding to target cloud video gaming and AR/VR experiences, as well as video surveillance video processing.
Finally, regarding plans for VVC and EVC support, Donnigan said that, as with all encoding vendors, NetInt is evaluating the new standards, but that it is the market that will pull them forward.
“The ecosystem has been clamoring for a high quality and feasible to implement hardware-based AV1 encoding solution. The largest customers in the AOM told us plainly that they needed a solution that could fit easily into their CPU-based x86 and Arm-based platforms, many before they could adopt AV1 at scale. So, in effect, they needed the solution before they could adopt the standard – and many are planning to adopt the standard. With that clear market feedback, and given the rise of WebRTC and cloud gaming solutions that are browser-based requiring extremely low-latency and carry very high individual stream counts, adding AV1 to our second-generation Codensity G5 ASIC was a ‘no brainer.’,” according to Donnigan.
“If/when we get a similar response to VVC or EVC, you can assume that we will not ignore it. With that said, at the moment, we don’t have plans for VVC or EVC as these standards are still in the very early exploration stage by the industry since there is no playback on mobile devices or browsers available, and support on consumer electronics devices, including CTVs, is lacking,” he continued.