
Intel Initiates EOL for the VCA2: Three Xeons on a PCIe Card - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15790/intel-initiates-eol-for-the-vca2-three-xeons-on-a-pcie-card
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theandrewbailey
Full blown Xeons on a PCI-e card?

Lately, I've been wondering as to why we don't see computers physically built
more like old workstations, with processors on cards plugging into I/O
backplanes. The modern incarnation might be CPU+RAM on a PCI-e x32 card, and a
simple "motherboard" with power and PCI-e. (Does 32 lane PCI-e exist? I've
never even seen photos.)

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dogma1138
More like 3 iGPUs with some extra baggage the CPUs on those aren’t accessible
directly in any way and not used for what needs to be offloaded from the fixed
pipeline encoders/decoders and even that might be offloaded to the main CPU.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Not directly accessible? There's ethernet ports on the card, and the article
mentions you can SSH into them.

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dogma1138
The SSH is used to manage the images running on the VCA’s you aren’t adding
CPU’s to the host.

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darknoon
"AVC transcoding at 30 FPS" sounds a lot less useful than what you can get
from an NVIDIA consumer or Quadro card via NVENC. Very weird, and multiple
Xeons doesn't sound cheap.

Am I misunderstanding the product?

I know Intel is coming out with a discrete GPU, which will probably have
plenty of video encode hardware to compete with NVIDIA (esp since game
streaming at 4K is quite popular).

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dogma1138
It can do 40+ 1080p streams in real time per “card” and Intel provides the
software.

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cosmotic
Each card has 3 E3-1585L CPUs, each with 4 cores (8 threads).

Intel's white paper
([https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...](https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-
papers/cloud-computing-quicksync-video-ffmpeg-white-paper.pdf)) says up to 12
per CPU.

The card uses 235W.

A consumer security DVR can record 16 channels at for $100.

I found a TI chip from 2011 that could encode 6 streams at 1080p30, about 10W
for $100.

The biggest advantage I see, as you pointed out, is the fact intel did all the
software work and it's practically drop in.

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dogma1138
Quality is a big factor especially for broadcast bitrates, QuickSync has
superb quality even at low bitrates better than even Turing NVENC which is top
notch and much much better than Pascal.

I doubt the Texas Instruments chip you found can do transcoding, it probably
can only encode/decode.

44 streams of 1080p30 for h264 to h264, ofc you can select any resolution and
frame rate you like.

[https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...](https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-
briefs/vca-2-visual-compute-accelerator-product-brief.pdf)

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rubyn00bie
This thing is sweet, and I wish the idea was still around, but it's obvious
these specific cards are awful now and just produced as a symptom of Intel
fucking the market on core counts.

Tangentially, I've been asking for a modular mac pro for years-- and this card
is closer to the current Mac Pro as far as right ideas go.

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calaphos
How did these work? The article says you could ssh into them, so they all had
their own RAM and ran their own individual os? I don't think the CPUs were
multi socket capable.

How did they boot? Network? So the pcie connection was essentially just for
networking?

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eqvinox
Google: PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge

they're independent systems with a special PCIe switch that looks like an end
device to all participants and allows shuffling data around at PCIe
performance

(the NTB function is integrated on some Intel processors AFAIK, but it may
also be a separate chip)

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exabrial
If one needed more cpus, the advantage of "just more servers" vs this card I'm
guessing is the extraordinarily lower latency and bandwidth available via PCIe
vs some other interconnect?

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dogma1138
These are used for live video encoding and editing mostly for broadcast.

I don’t think they’ve been in wide use outside of the sports broadcast
industry but I might be wrong.

The main component that is used isn’t the actual CPU but the IGPs Intel has
one of the best video encoder cores out there right now.

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dmitrygr
It has power input and ethernet ports so one can ssh into it, so does it at
all need the host on the PCIe bus?

So, can I just plug power and ethernet into it and boot linux?

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rbanffy
It may need some support from the host if it doesn't have any local persistent
storage.

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dmitrygr
netboot + tmpfs root would be good enough for me

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rbanffy
Judging by the prices Xeon Phi coprocessors fetch on eBay, I'm not really
optimistic about finding these floating around.

