Chinese tech giant claims better performance than competing GPUs:
Chinese social media, cloud, and entertainment giant Tencent on Monday revealed that it has started mass production of a home brew video transcoding accelerator.
The announcement comes nearly two years after the company unveiled a trio of custom chips designed to accelerate everything from streaming video to networking and artificial intelligence workloads.
In a post published on WeChat, Tencent Cloud revealed that "tens of thousands" of its Canghai chips, which are designed to offload video encode/decode for latency sensitive workloads, have been deployed internally to accelerate cloud gaming and live broadcasting.
Tencent says the Canghai chip can be paired with GPUs from a variety of vendors to support low-latency game streaming. When used for video transcoding, Tencent said a single node equipped with Canghai can deliver up to 1,024 video channels . We'll note that Nvidia, with the launch of its L4 GPUs last month, made similar claims. Without real-world benchmarks, it's hard to say how either firm's claims stack up.
[...] When it comes to spinning custom chips to improve the efficiency and economics of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services gets a lot of credit. The American e-tail giant and cloud titan has developed everything from custom CPUs, AI training and inference accelerators, and smartNICs to offload many housekeeping workloads.
And while Google has developed an accelerator of its own, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), most US cloud providers have largely stuck with commercially available parts from the likes of Intel, AMD, Ampere, Broadcom, or Nvidia, rather than designing their own.
However, in China, custom chips appear to be more prevalent, with development an imperative accelerated by US sanctions that mean some tech products can't be exported to the Middle Kingdom.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 21, @04:39AM
Incompatible keywords. No.
Like...okay, if you have a single large corporate customer who orders tens of thousands of units of your thing, tweaked for them...technically...but how different is this than saying "we offer Product X in A, B, and C configurations...it's just that C Configuration happens to only be bought by one customer"?
So it sounds like they're offering them to the market in general, i.e. not a single customer.
LOL, "what, we're only selling to Amazon?" You might as well say "our only customer is the United States" :P
Getting rather tired of these bullshit headlines just to get clicks.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday April 21, @07:10AM
... well, except for the US government bureaucrats who think tech sanctions are a good idea:
Which means pretty soon even more of the tech that companies used to buy from the US will be bought from China instead. If this wasn't so utterly predictable the minute the Orange Buffoon announced his stable-genius plans for sanctions...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 21, @03:11PM
Hey tencent, how about a video accelerator that also can strip DRM at high speed?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @03:21PM
Junk entertainment while eating junk food paid for by doing junk work.
Capitalism has found the efficient solution for mass producing the cheapest human existence. Enjoy More(tm).