Blog | Cloud Media and AI Servers with Intel Flex GPU

November 8th 2022

Cloud Media and AI Servers with Intel GPUs

Ivan Trendafilovski - Technical Engineer - DiGiCOR

Intel has entered the market with a portfolio of new GPU series called Flex (formerly codenamed Arctic Sound-M) targeted to meet the demand for the high-end workload for the Intelligent Visual Cloud. It strives in supporting the Open Architecture Standards and software stacks with optimized density and quality with critical server capabilities for high reliability, availability, and scalability.

Media processing, media delivery, AI visual inference, cloud gaming, and desktop virtualization are proliferating in data centers. As a result, the data center GPU silicon market segment for visual cloud is projected to grow to reach $15 billion by 2026. That rapid increase comes to an industry largely beset by dependence on proprietary, licensed coding models, like CUDA for GPU programming. With Flex Series GPUs Intel aims to offer a single graphics solution to handle a wide range of workloads while delivering exceptional performance without compromising on the quality of the delivery

Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series

The Flex Series GPU solution addresses these limitations while delivering significant advantages over alternative solutions, improving flexibility, scalability, latency, and power consumption.

It also delivers more than 30% bandwidth improvement which significantly improves the total cost of ownership (TCO) savings, in addition, it has broad support for popular media tools, APIs, frameworks, and the latest media codecs.

Flex series 140

The Flex Series 140 is the entry model and targets Low profile solutions.

Flex series 170

The 170 series is the higher-end GPU that provides uncapped performance in a full-size card.

Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series 140 vs 170

Media Processing and Delivery

In this day and age with the rise of fast bandwidth networks such as 5G, the demand for fast and reliable media delivery has never been greater. Viewers expect high broadcast quality with higher resolutions across a variety of devices. With this increased demand media providers are constantly on the lookout for how to improve their infrastructure to meet the growing demand without compromising on quality and availability. The Intel Flex Series GPU helps by increasing the density of streams that can be supported per server—without compromising quality.

Intel aims Flex datacenter GPUs at videogame streaming with Advanced Ray Tracing and Rendering Technology

With the global cloud gaming market expected to reach $3.2B by 2026, growing 43.2% from 2021 through 2026, it’s becoming one of the leading industries that has constant growth, so service providers need to optimize TCO while meeting subscriber demands for superior experiences. This means that game service providers must continually innovate to deliver the first-rate player experience to their customers while operating the most efficient infrastructure possible to have a viable business model.

The Intel Flex Series GPU increases the density per server without compromising quality. Serve a growing number of subscribers with a smaller data center footprint that reduces equipment and facility costs. High performance per watt helps drive TCO down further.

Working with Intel, Supermicro has identified multiple server solutions that offer the best tradeoffs to provide cloud gaming architecture. These systems support the latest Intel Data Center GPU Flex series accelerators. GPU accelerators are crucial to delivering cloud gaming, video streaming, virtual desktop, and AI services.

Each Cloud gaming deployment has certain requirements that are a must to deliver a smooth experience across the platforms, some of which are:

● Support for the latest Accelerators

● Scalable architectures

● Reliable and manageable systems & Worldwide Distributed Internet Infrastructure

● Support for major software platforms that include Linux, Windows, virtualization

● User Experiences such as Low latency, responsiveness, high frame rates, and high visual fidelity graphics

Cloud gaming systems architecture generally is comprised of

● Gaming Platform in Cloud Data Center delivers game engines, updates to games, and analytics

● Edge Computing delivers ultra-low latency streaming, high-performance rendering, and data collection to improve the platform QoS.

● Clients deliver the gaming experience to each person. A client can be an Android device, a computer, or a console

AI Visual Inference

The growth in security and site monitoring cameras live broadcast streams, and OTT video is driving demand for AI Visual Inference. The Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series is ideal for these workloads, including Smart City, Library indexing and compliance, and AI-guided video enhancement workloads.

Utilizing The Flex 140 for Basic AI models such as Simple object detection, while the Flex 170 is more geared towards pipelines that include complex AI models such as multiple object detection

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a mature market with many different utilities all with an accelerated move toward the adoption of discrete graphics, as modern OSes and applications increasingly rely on GPU and media hardware acceleration.

The 140 Flex VDI-enabled GPUs are ideal for high-density VD applications such as office productivity, video, browsing and low-level compute performance requirements, while the 170 Flex is geared towards providing High-Performance Virtual Desktops targeting power users such as 3D and media content creators, designers whose workloads demand high-end graphics and compute.

Supermicro building blocks using Intel Flex GPU

As a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology, and innovation, Supermicro develops and provides end-to-end green computing solutions to the data center, cloud computing, enterprise IT, big data, HPC, and embedded markets.