Xilinx Announces Real-Time Server Appliances for High-Quality, Low-Cost Live Video Streaming

Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, today introduced two real-time computing video appliances for easy-to-scale, ultra-high-density video transcoding applications. Based on the new Xilinx Real-Time (RT) Server reference architecture, these new appliances will enable service providers delivering applications such as eSports and game streaming platforms, social and video conferencing, live distance learning, telemedicine and live broadcast video to optimize video quality and bitrate at the lowest cost per channel for significant TCO savings over both software-based and fixed-architecture approaches.

Designed for edge and on-premise compute-intensive workloads where video channel density, throughput and latency are critical requirements, the new Xilinx Real-Time Video Appliances feature optimized hardware architectures and software to deliver the industry’s highest channel density and lowest latency performance. The appliances are available in two pre-configured options integrating Xilinx Alveo data center accelerator cards – the High Channel Density Video Appliance and the Ultra-Low Bitrate Video Appliance.

“As the volume of video streaming increases exponentially, optimized architectures are becoming critical,” said Donna Yasay, vice president of marketing, Data Center Group, at Xilinx. “We’re all experiencing this today in the current COVID-19 remote work, learn and play environment -- the massive increase in concurrent channel usage is taxing service provider business models and driving up bandwidth costs. With these new reference architectures, Xilinx is enabling solution providers to maximize cost savings, while delivering high-quality video streaming services.”

Optimized for Video Transcoding

Developed to deliver the lowest cost per channel, the High Channel Density Video Appliance integrates up to eight Alveo U30 data center acceleration cards, also launching today. The new Alveo U30 card addresses the need for high-density video processing in a low-profile form factor accelerator card. The Alveo U30 card is powered by the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, a power-optimized all-programmable system-on-chip (SoC) with integrated video codec and graphics engines for ultra-high-definition video. The U30 card supports both the H.264 and HEVC (H.265) codecs and is capable of streaming up to sixteen 1080p30 channels per card.