After being successfully “lit” in March last year, our self-developed video codec chip “Canghai” has been mass-produced and put into use with tens of thousands of chips. In scenarios such as cloud games and live on-demand broadcasting, Canghai currently provides services for Tencent’s self-developed business and public cloud customers. In the newly announced results of the MSU* Hardware Video Encoding Competition, Canghai won the first place in all 8 scores of the 2 tracks he participated in.
The most influential top event in the field of video compression. It has been held for 17 consecutive sessions so far, attracting the participation of well-known domestic and foreign companies including Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Byte, Kuaishou, Ali and Tencent.
From the perspective of various indicators, at the same bit rate, Canghai can greatly improve the picture quality compared with standard hardware such as GPU in the industry; at the high frame rate gear of 120fps, with the same quality, Canghai is further saving than the industry-leading level. The code rate is above 10%; in addition, the encoding time of a single frame of 1080p by Canghai chip is only 4 milliseconds, and the throughput performance is hardly affected by encoding parameters and video types.
——The same bandwidth is more high-definition, the same image quality is more bandwidth-saving, and the editing speed is fast.
8 No. 1 items, “Impossible Triangle”
Canghai chip focuses on solving the impossible triangle of high image quality, low delay and low cost in video codec.
In terms of algorithms, the Canghai chip fully realizes all mainstream coding tools such as high-precision motion search, full-rate distortion optimization, and high-efficiency adaptive quantization, and integrates Tencent Cloud software encoder code rate control and other leading technologies, and the compression rate is higher than the market. More than 35% of the standard product.
In terms of architecture, the video pre-analysis computing unit is further offloaded to the hardware, which greatly reduces the dependence of tasks on CPU performance in high-density transcoding scenarios. Through flexible multi-core expansion architecture, high-performance coding pipeline, and hierarchical memory layout, it meets the requirements of high throughput, low latency, and real-time performance.
Tencent’s rich multimedia application scenarios provide Canghai with sufficient analysis and verification conditions.
Scenario verification shows:
For cloud gaming scenarios, the Yaoguang board of Canghai Chip can be flexibly matched with GPUs from different manufacturers;
For video transcoding scenarios, Canghai chip provides high-density transcoding capability of 1024 channels on a single machine, which minimizes transcoding costs;
In 4K/8K ultra-high-definition, high-frame-rate video scenarios, Canghai chips can achieve low-latency, high-quality transcoding that software encoding cannot achieve;
21 firsts, video cloud capabilities continue to lead the industry
As a cloud company that understands audio and video best, Tencent Cloud Audio and Video also continuously provides customers with lower cost, lower latency, and more extreme compression processing effects through joint optimization of software and hardware.
In this year’s MSU cloud video transcoding competition, Tencent Cloud’s media processing product MPS (Media Processing Service) also stood out among many international manufacturers, and won the first place in 21 evaluations of H264 and HEVC/AV1 tracks.
Among them, the TXAV1/V265 encoder ranks first in all objective and subjective indicators of PSNR, SSIM and VMAF in all resolution tests. At the same time, Tencent O264 encoder also won the first place in 6 indicators of the track.
Under the same transcoding cost, using Tencent Cloud MPS media processing products can save bandwidth and storage costs by more than 20% compared with other participating manufacturers. Currently, Tencent Cloud’s media processing product MPS processes more than 21 billion minutes of video per month on average, helping customers save hundreds of millions of dollars in bandwidth and storage costs every month.
In fact, this is not the first time that Tencent Cloud MPS has taken the lead in the industry competition. In the report released by the professional streaming media technology community SLC last year, Tencent Cloud MPS also surpassed all international manufacturers, and won the best performance in all three scenarios.
At present, Tencent Cloud has served 90% of domestic audio and video customers, and is still increasing its efforts to go overseas, joining hands with all walks of life to move towards the era of full-true Internet.
For scenarios with strong business needs, Tencent has long-term chip research and development planning and investment. At present, Tencent has achieved full coverage of end-to-end chip design and verification, and a variety of chips have achieved large-scale implementation.
The AI reasoning chip “Zixiao” adopts a self-developed storage and computing architecture and a self-developed acceleration module, which provides up to 3 times the calculation acceleration performance and an overall cost saving of more than 45%, and has been put into use in internal business;
The high-performance network chip “Xuanling” adopts self-developed network, storage, and computing acceleration solutions to achieve “0″ CPU usage of the host computer and up to 4 times performance improvement, helping to build the next generation of high-performance network infrastructure.
In the future, we will continue to deepen the underlying software and hardware, explore the best performance and best cost performance, and help more enterprises and developers to innovate on the cloud.
The road is obstructed and long, but the journey is approaching.
Post time: Apr-19-2023