Throughout its latest ‘Vision’ event, Intel shared particulars on its upcoming Arctic Sound-M (ATS-M) GPU. ATS-M is Intel’s general-purpose datacentre GPU. It’s designed for compute and transcoding operations and its set to kind the spine of Intel and its purchasers’ streaming and cloud gaming providers.
ATS-M will are available two variations, with respective TDPs of 75W and 150W. It’s designed to be a versatile and scalable resolution for cloud suppliers. A single card can help as much as eight 4K streams, or greater than 30 1080p streams per card, which suggests as much as 120 streams per node or 13,000 per rack.
The cardboard that Intel displayed is a single slot passive card. Meaning it is designed for use in a excessive density, excessive airflow datacentre surroundings. By itself, ATS-M wouldn’t provide stellar gaming efficiency, however once you pack tens of 1000’s of them collectively, there’s no motive that Intel can’t grow to be a frontrunner in cloud GPU providers. After all, that each one is determined by the particulars of the platform, software program person interface and one thing that the general public gained’t be aware about, the pricing.
Notably, ATS-M helps AV1 encoding, which is about to grow to be a extensively used commonplace for streamers, content material suppliers, and creators. As AV1 turns into extra extensively utilized by streaming providers, the necessity for AV1 {hardware} help might give Intel an vital benefit within the quick to medium time period. AV1 encoding help can be set to be supplied by Arc desktop GPUs.
The opposite attention-grabbing utility for ATS-M GPUs is cloud gaming. Will these GPUs energy the mysterious Project Endgame? Although it hasn’t been talked about so much, this might be a future Intel cloud gaming service, or maybe a consumer service that’s powered by Intel infrastructure.
On the Imaginative and prescient occasion, Intel talked concerning the accelerating development of cloud gaming. It estimates the cloud gaming market to have a worth of round $3.2 billion in 2026. This contains Home windows and Android cloud gaming providers. Nvidia and Microsoft have wager large on the GeForce Now and Xbox cloud gaming providers. After which there’s the metaverse. Development in cloud functions would require large quantities of computing energy so as to run seamlessly.
Arctic Sound-M is already sampling to prospects and it has been validated to be used in no less than fifteen designs. We will anticipate extra information on its functions across the time of its scheduled launch within the third quarter of 2022.
