AMD Releases The Alveo MA35D Media Accelerator

Published on April 7, 2023

Recently, AMD released the Alveo MA35D Media Accelerator, a "next-generation media accelerator for video processing".

The card is claimed to be capable of transcoding up to 32 1080P, 60FPS AV1 streams in real time (paired with an AMD EPYC server CPU), allowing for "reduced datacenter footprint".

For such performance to be achieved, AMD used two FPGA chips with dedicated AI processing units to "optimize for perceived visual quality and improve compression efficiency". Its decoder can handle AV1, HEVC, H.264 as well as VP9. With this new product, AMD hopes to enable "A New Class of Interactive Services" - live streaming at ultra low latencies and high resolution, which can be a game changer in fields such as live shopping, live auctions, online betting or cloud gaming. The product is clearly not intended for the average user, and is targeting the datacenter market. Hopefully, this product can deliver its promise and offer better services for us customers.

Sources:

https://www.xilinx.com/applications/data-center/video-imaging/alveo-ma35d.html#asic