Canada’s NetInt Technologies has announced what it claims is the first hardware AV1 encoder design to be commercially available. The ASIC is looking to tap nascent demand for AOMedia’s next-gen codec, but market scepticism 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, 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 16GB of system RAM. All the required memory and storage is housed on the Quadra cards, meaning that the server load is minimal.
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 form factor. 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 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.