NETINT Quadra VPUs target CPU inefficiencies with high-density AV1 encoding

The transition to AV1 is hit by a 'compute wall' where software-only encoding cannot scale economically for live OTT or cloud gaming. By offloading video processing to dedicated ASICs, operators can achieve massive density gains—up to 480 streams per 1RU server in surveillance use cases—without the thermal and power overhead of general-purpose CPUs or rendering-heavy GPUs. This marks a shift toward 'streams-per-watt' as the primary metric for sustainable infrastructure. Watch for major CDNs and cloud providers to integrate specialized VPUs like Quadra as standard IaaS offerings for large-scale media pipelines.

Additional context. This shift toward specialized video processing units (VPUs) arrives as the broader data center industry faces an unprecedented energy crisis. Per a June 2026 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data center electricity demand soared by 17% in 2025 alone, driven largely by the massive computational requirements of AI and high-density media workloads. This growth is placing immense pressure on server operators to maximize power efficiency. For instance, per Akamai in August 2025, benchmarking revealed that VPUs can achieve up to 4.7x higher energy efficiency than traditional GPUs for media transcoding tasks. For a 1,000-stream 1080p deployment, this efficiency gap translates to reducing annual energy consumption from 32 MWh down to just 5.5 MWh.

Simultaneously, AV1 has moved from an experimental codec to a production standard, further straining legacy architectures. Per a Netflix technical blog update in early 2026, AV1 now powers roughly 30% of all viewing on the platform and is expected to become the dominant codec by the end of the year. YouTube has seen even more aggressive growth, with over 75% of video playback now utilizing AV1 as of March 2026. This widespread adoption is largely driven by AV1's ability to reduce bandwidth use by one-third compared to AVC or HEVC. However, as the industry begins looking toward the Alliance for Open Media's development of AV2, the need for flexible, ASIC-based hardware that can handle rising encoding complexity while staying within strict power budgets has become a critical strategic requirement for streaming providers.