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posted by martyb on Friday June 04 2021, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the seen-any-good-deals-on-Xeons-lately? dept.

Google Replaces Millions of Intel's CPUs With Its Own Homegrown Chips

Google has designed its own new processors, the Argos video (trans)coding units (VCU), that have one solitary purpose: processing video. The highly efficient new chips have allowed the technology giant to replace tens of millions of Intel CPUs with its own silicon.

For many years Intel's video decoding/encoding engines that come built into its CPUs have dominated the market both because they offered leading-edge performance and capabilities and because they were easy to use. But custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) tend to outperform general-purpose hardware because they are designed for one workload only. As such, Google turned to developing its own specialized hardware for video processing tasks for YouTube, and to great effect.

However, Intel may have a trick up its sleeve with its latest tech that could win back Google's specialized video processing business.

[...] Instead of stream processors like we see in GPUs, Google's VCU integrates ten H.264/VP9 encoder engines, several decoder cores, four LPDDR4-3200 memory channels (featuring 4x32-bit interfaces), a PCIe interface, a DMA engine, and a small general-purpose core for scheduling purposes. Most of the IP, except the in-house designed encoders/transcoders, were licensed from third parties to cut down on development costs. Each VCU is also equipped with 8GB of usable ECC LPDDR4 memory.

[...] Intel isn't standing still, though. The company's DG1 Xe-LP-based quad-chip SG1 server card can decode up to 28 4Kp60 streams as well as transcode up to 12 simultaneous streams. Essentially, Intel's SG1 does exactly what Google's Argos VCU does: scale video decoding and transcoding performance separately from the server count and thus reduce the number of general-purpose processors required in a data center used for video applications.

Google still uses Xeon servers to attach up to 20 of the Argos VCUs. It's estimated that it replaced between 4 to 33 million Xeons.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @09:27PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @09:27PM (#1141884)

    That is the point of the tech monopolies. To be so big, to lose so much money, that competing with them is all but impossible.

    Why you might ask? Many wondered. Then, once they had what they felt was a total lock on the market, they showed us all. Yes, "Broadcast yourself" all you want, unless you are a dirty double-plus ungood crimethinker, Then you don't just upload your material and watch the Googlebux flood in. No, you get to pay for hosting your content, pay for every viewer of it and grovel for donations or subscriptions as the companies who were allowed to gain a near monopoly in facilitating those things also banish you.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @10:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @10:37AM (#1142009)

    No, you get to pay for hosting your content, pay for every viewer of it and grovel for donations or subscriptions as the companies who were allowed to gain a near monopoly in facilitating those things also banish you.

    Holy fuck, you sound butt hurt. You know, if your 'content' is not about putting propaganda videos for ISIS or inciting genocide or posting bullshit about covid or similar idiocy, or posting videos of other movies, no one will remove you from youtube. On the other hand, if you want to start a fascist movement centred on lies (the bigger the lie the better) and you get thrown off a free platform and then you can't be arsed to pay a little bit for bandwidth (like 1Gbps flat connections are with dedicated equipment in datacenter are $50), then I'm sorry, but you sound worse than a beggar on a street next to an open soup kitchen asking for money so they can buy a "meal". Or someone bitching they are poor but getting a job would only allow them to buy better weed so no need to work and why are smokes so expensive?

    Yeah, some people, hopeless like that. gimme gimme gimme and whaa whaa whaa.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:32AM (#1142286)

    > To be so big, to lose so much money...

    STOP right there. You sound like my wife.