US field programmable gate array (FPGA) pioneer Xilinx has achieved something quite remarkable given the circumstances, dropping two new video transcoding appliances for compute-intensive workloads. Based on the NGCodec assets acquired last year, Xilinx promised its data center customers a major evolution in video capabilities by combining NGCodec’s encoding expertise with its own acceleration platform – and an evolution for people who are tired of racking and stacking Intel CPUs is precisely what they’ve got. The result is the Xilinx Real-Time Server reference architecture, targeted at live streaming, esports, gaming, teleconferencing and every other latency critical application that has experienced explosive growth in 2020. Optimized for video transcoding, Xilinx’s pair of appliances are built on the open source FFmpeg framework…