NETINT says VPUs are now a real video silicon category
NETINT Technologies, a pioneer in Video Processing Units (VPUs), reflects on its journey to category creation, marked by receiving a 75th Technology and Engineering Emmy Award alongside AMD, Google, and Meta for efficient hardware video accelerators. The article highlights the growing industry shift toward purpose-built silicon for video encoding, driven by escalating video demand and the limitations of general-purpose CPUs and GPUs. NETINT details its product development, ecosystem integration efforts, and customer success stories demonstrating the power efficiency and density benefits of VPUs.
Key Takeaways
- NETINT shared the 75th Technology and Engineering Emmy with AMD, Google, and Meta for “Design and Deployment of Efficient Hardware Video Accelerators for Cloud.”
- The company says its 2018 T408 drew about 7 watts under full load and fit in a U.2 NVMe slot, enabling dozens of simultaneous HD streams per server.
- Quadra, built on Samsung 14 nanometers, quadrupled encoding capacity and was the first hardware implementation of AV1 encoding in silicon, shipped commercially in early 2021.
- NETINT says there are now more than 200,000 VPUs in product, and Dylan Patel’s 2022 SemiAnalysis profile cited customer wins including ByteDance, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and Kuaishou.
- Akamai’s September 2024 partnership with NETINT, tested with Cires21, showed 4x to 6x energy efficiency gains versus GPUs, with roughly 0.4 to 0.7 watts per stream versus 2.5 to 3.6 watts per stream.
Why It Matters
The immediate takeaway is that purpose-built video silicon has moved from niche experiment to recognized infrastructure category, backed by an Emmy and by deployments the company says are already in production at scale. That matters for streaming operators because the article ties VPUs to lower watts per stream, higher stream density, and easier integration through NVMe slots, FFmpeg, and GStreamer. The competitive frame is clear: Google and Meta built internal ASICs, while NETINT is selling merchant silicon to the rest of the market. Watch whether the Akamai integration expands beyond the September 2024 announcement and whether NETINT’s claimed 200,000 VPU installed base keeps growing.
Read full article at netint.biz