A couple of months ago, the chip giant presented the Intel Arctic Sound-M, a graphics accelerator that was aimed at the professional sector and whose main objective was data centers. This graphical solution mounts a DG2 XE-HPG GPUacronyms that refer to the category of high performance computing, and that differentiate it from other solutions aimed at the gaming or low consumption sector.
The Intel Arctic Sound-M was presented with a very important promise, to reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 30% thanks to the use of the AV1 codec. At the time we told you that the DG2 XE-HPG GPU can mount up to 512 execution units, but it seems that Intel has used a variant with 128 active execution units in the Intel Arctic Sound-M AV1, which translates to 1,024 FP32 cores.
This configuration makes sense, since it is a graphics accelerator designed for concrete tasks, such as streaming games in the cloud, for example, and fits better with the design and cooling system it comes with. By this I mean that I had a hard time believing that the Intel Arctic Sound-M could come with 4,096 FP32 cores integrated in a monoslot design and with a passive heatsink system, and that 1,024 FP32 core configuration does fit the bill.
The Intel Arctic Sound-M uses an interface PCIE Gen4 x16 and uses a single additional 8-pin power connector. To demonstrate the value offered by this graphics accelerator, Intel has a comparison of bandwidth consumption playing content under the AV1 standard and AVC (H.264). As we can see in the video at the end of the article, there is a notable difference, since the first consumes an average of 44.9 Mb/s (megabits per second), while the second consumes an average of 64.7 Mb/s.
In terms of quality, I must say that I don’t see a major difference between the two, even though I have a good eye for these things. Intel has reiterated that the Intel Arctic Sound-M can work with up to 8 simultaneous streams in 4K resolution or up to 30 streams at the same time in 1080p resolution.
