Media as a Service: Demand for Video Transcoding Growing by Leaps and Bounds

Deliver high-quality, low-latency live streaming and video on demand using a transcoding platform built on the latest Intel® technology

Meet Today’s Media-as-a-Service Challenges by Modernizing Your Infrastructure

This solution provides a starting point for developing a media-as-a- service platform for transcoding.

If you are responsible for:

• Investment decisions and business strategy:

You’ll learn how Intel® technologies can help solve the pressing media as a service and transcoding challenges facing cloud service providers (CSPs) today.

• Figuring out how to implement media as a service:

You’ll learn about transcoding architecture components and how they work together to create a cohesive business solution for media as a service.

Executive Summary

Cloud service providers are seeking the ability to support a wider range of codecs with low latency, as well as to reduce the time it takes to launch new services, such as transcoding for live streaming and video on demand. By building a media-as-a- service platform based on Intel® technologies, you can expect the following benefits:

• Flexibility and control with continuously optimized software

• Ecosystem contributions and customizations to open source software

• Support for hardware acceleration, now and in the future

• Assistance in supporting Intel adjacent technologies, such as Intel® Optane™

technology, Intel® networking products, Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel®

QAT) and Intel® FPGAs.

• Access to new technology through the Intel® Cloud Insider Advanced Technology Sandbox

• Optimizations resulting from Intel’s collaboration with key ISVs such as Harmonic*

Legacy infrastructure cannot deliver the speedy, high-quality media experiences that today’s customers expect. Upgrading your infrastructure to include the latest generation of Intel® hardware and software, such as processors, accelerators, and SDKs, can help you keep up with the dynamic Visual Cloud marketplace.

Media as a Service: Demand for Video Transcoding Growing by Leaps and Bounds

Advances in technology, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and faster broadband speeds, are driving demand for several cloud-based media-as-a-service

capabilities—at Intel we refer to such capabilities as the Visual Cloud. These services include media creation and delivery, cloud graphics (such as those used in cloud gaming and remote rendering), video analytics, and the combination of video streams and artificial intelligence for smart cities and smart factories. At the heart of all these Visual Cloud usages lies the fundamental service of transcoding (see Figure 1); that is, encoding and decoding video.

Figure 1. How transcoding works

The Visual Cloud offers ample opportunities for you as a cloud service provider (CSP) to enhance and expand your service offerings. In particular, both live video streaming and video on demand are hotbeds of activity. Ten million videos are watched on Snapchat per day¹, and Internet video traffic is expected to grow fourfold from 2016 to 2021, a CAGR of 31 percent².

Once in the cloud, video streams of different formats must be transcoded for distribution to a wide spectrum of devices with differing standards and requirements. Delivery can be real-time (streaming) or near-real-time (video on demand). You must be able to deliver enough concurrent streams per server to make infrastructure costs manageable and services profitable. Other considerations include video quality, codecs, frame rate, and bit rate.

Introduction to Transcoding

Outdated infrastructure that was built to deliver limited media streams cannot provide the performance necessary to store, track, transcode and deliver modern video assets using new codecs such as AV1, VP8/VP9 and higher video quality such as 4K Ultra-High Definition (UHD), Cloud DVR and High Dynamic Range (HDR). For example, a single second of standard high-definition video content takes up 93 MB of storage. And getting that data into and out of storage, let alone encoding and decoding it, requires a lot of processing power and fast I/O.

Figure 2 shows a typical transcoding workflow. The data center contains many racks of servers. In each rack, multiple nodes encode the video data, package it into streams, and send the streams out to the customer. The CPUs that handle these tasks must be powerful—and that’s where Intel’s microarchitecture comes into play (See Figure 3).

Input

Video File Compressed

Video

Compressed Audio

Compressed Video

Compressed Audio

Output Video File Demux

(libavformat) Decoder Encoder

Decoder Encoder

(libavformat)Mux

Audio Codec (ex: MP3) Video Codec (ex: x264/x265)

Decoded Frames

Decoded Audio

Table of Contents

Executive Summary . . . 1

Media as a Service: Demand for Video Transcoding Growing by Leaps and Bounds . . . 1

Introduction to Transcoding . . . 2

Choose between Integrated and Discrete Graphics . . . .3

Speed Up Transcoding with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) . . . .4

Put Smart Networking, Storage and Software to Work . . . .4

Solution Architectures . . . 4

Live Streaming (High-Density) . . . .4

Video on Demand . . . .4

Architecture Design Considerations . . 6

Summary . . . 7

Solutions Proven by Your Peers . . . 7

Figure 3. Intel® microarchitecture: just what transcoding needs Figure 2. Sample transcoding workflow

CenterData

Rack 1

Package Stream

Upload Stream

Servers Retrieve

Stream

Master Node Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4 Node 5 Node 6 Node 7 Node 8 Node 9

Stream Repository

including transcoding. Performance contributors of the Intel®

Xeon® Scalable processors include the following:

• High core count with efficient thread management maximizes utilization of CPU cycles for production

• More fast memory channels (six versus four in the previous generation)³ significantly increase the memory throughput that is one of the main performance factors for video workloads

• A large, low-latency L1/L2 cache hierarchy improves the efficiency of on-die data handling, supporting memory- intensive video workloads

• Support for high-speed memory (DDR4-2666, compared to DDR4-2400 in the predecessor platform) increases data throughput³

• Mesh interconnect between cores enables fewer hops and lower latency data movement between cores and sockets, compared to predecessor ring topologies

Choose between Integrated and Discrete Graphics Integrated graphics (Iris® Pro), available on the Intel® Xeon®

processor E3 family, avoids the extra cost, complexity and power consumption of discrete graphics. Alternatively, the hardware acceleration available on Intel Xeon Scalable processors provides a dramatic improvement in discrete graphics processing throughput over pure-software

14 nm Process Technology

Integrated Fabric:

Intel® Omni-Path Architecture

Power Management Per Core P-State (PCPS) Uncore Frequency Scaling (UFS) Energy Efficient Turbo (EET) On die PMAX detection (NEW)

Intel® Speed Shift Technology (HWP) (NEW) PCI Express* 3.0

48 Lanes

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (2 threads/core) Intel® Turbo Boost Technology Up to 28 cores

Integrated Voltage Regulator

New Skylake Server Feature Existing Feature

Memory Technology:

6xDDR4 channels 2133, 2400, 2666 MT/s Rebalanced Cache Hierarchy:

Increased MLC

1.375 MB Last Level Cache/Core Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512)

Intel® UPI Intel® Ultra Path Interconnect

(Intel® UPI) Fabric

PCie*3.0 DMI

IMC IMC

Core LCC

LCC LCC LCC Core

Core Core

. . .

. . . LCC LCC Core

Core

System Agent

approaches, while also reducing cost and permitting higher flexibility as compared to customized hardware solutions.

Whatever your graphics processing needs, Intel offers a CPU that can meet them.

Speed Up Transcoding with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512)

With 512-bit vector operations capabilities, Intel AVX-512 (available on Intel Xeon Scalable processors) can handle your most demanding computational tasks, including live-stream video. Applications can pack eight 64-bit or sixteen 32-bit integers into the registers, with up to two 512-bit fused- multiply add (FMA) units, thus doubling the width of data registers, doubling the number of registers, and, doubling the width of FMA units, compared to Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0 (Intel® AVX2).

Put Smart Networking, Storage and Software to Work Advanced Intel® Ethernet network interface cards (NICs) provide high-bandwidth and low-latency server network connectivity and can accelerate select infrastructure workloads to free up compute cycles for more video processing on the processor. Intel® Optane™ technology provides high throughput and low latency for reading and writing video data.

In addition, Intel offers an entire software ecosystem around

the platforms available for media solutions including the Intel®

Media Server Studio HEVC software encoder.

Solution Architectures

The transcoding ecosystem is diverse (see Figure 4) and navigating the infrastructure decisions can be challenging.

Infrastructure requirements differ between streaming and on-demand workloads. The reference architectures discussed below can help you choose the right combination of software, middleware, and hardware to support your transcoding needs.

Live Streaming (High-Density)

For live-streaming use cases, where real-time delivery is more important than super high quality, your transcoding platform (see Table 1) should be based on the Intel Xeon processor E3 family. In such use cases, the transcoding is performed on the edge, as opposed to in a large data center. The Intel Xeon processor E3 family supports high density (such as in blade servers) so you can achieve more streams per server.

Video on Demand

For video on demand use cases, the focus is on quality.

These use cases, which are generally powered by large server farms, can benefit from the raw power offered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Figure 4. The transcoding ecosystem

Intel® Technology in the Real World

Mobile Viewpoint, a global company that focuses on the development and implementation of IP transmission solutions for both the broadcast and security industries, collaborated with Intel to deliver quality high dynamic range (HDR) High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, or H.265) encoded video. Using a combination of Intel® Xeon® processor E3 family, Intel® Media Server Studio, and Intel® Quick Sync Video plus its own innovative technology, Mobile Viewpoint can broadcast live from every corner of the world.⁴

“Intel® processors with hardware HEVC encoding and sophisticated media processing software are helping to power Mobile Viewpoint’s live, high- resolution, reliable broadcasting solution so the world can stay better informed of fast-changing news and events on-the-go.”

— Jeff McVeigh,

Intel Software and Services Group vice president and Visual Computing Products general manager

Table 2. General Reference Architecture for Video-on-Demand Transcoding

Table 1. General Reference Architecture for Live-Streaming (High-Density) Transcoding

Component Recommendation

APIs CSP-customized

Framework FFmpeg*

Intel® Media Server Studio Libraries/SDKs

Libx264/265 LibVA

Intel® Quick Sync Video

Hypervisor/Container n/a

Operating System CentOS*

Kernel Driver Device Driver

Hardware Intel® Xeon® processor E3 family

CSP = cloud service provider

Component Recommendation

APIs CSP-customized

Framework FFmpeg*

Libraries/SDKs Libx264/265

Hypervisor/Container n/a

Operating System CentOS*

Kernel Driver n/a

Hardware Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors

CSP = cloud service provider

Table 3. Typical Server Configuration

Platform Component Recommendation

Processor Intel® Xeon® Gold 6132 processor

Frequency 2.60 MHz

Max Turbo Frequency 2.7 MHz

Memory 4*16 GB 2666 MHz

Front-side Bus (FSB)/Quick Path Interconnect

(QPI) Frequency 10.4 GT/s

Sockets 2

Number of Cores per Socket 14

L1 Cache

L2 Cache

L3 Cache (Total)

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology

NUMA

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology

Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512

(Intel® AVX-512)

Table 4. Recommended OS and Framework Versions

Component Recommendation

APIs CSP-customized

Framework FFmpeg*

Libraries/SDKs Libx264/265

Hypervisor/Container n/a

Operating System CentOS*

Architecture Design Considerations

Tables 3 and 4 present some general guidelines for server, OS and framework configuration.

Summary

Increasing the efficiency with which you deliver high-quality, high-volume content can help you attract new customers, retain existing customers, and explore new sources of revenue. Forward-thinking CSPs are upgrading and expanding their infrastructure with technologies from Intel that support many media-as-a-service workloads, including transcoding. You can use the reference architectures

provided here to guide your investments in Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel® accelerators, smart network interface cards, low-latency, high-throughput Intel Optane technology and more, to deliver excellent business value and maintain a low total cost of ownership. As video traffic explodes across the Internet, you can successfully compete against much larger CSPs and tap into a marketplace worth billions of dollars.

You may find the following resources useful:

• Intel® Cloud Insider Program

• Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors

• Intel® Xeon® processor E3 family

• Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512)

• Intel® Programmable Acceleration Card

• Intel® Media Server Studio

• Intel® Solid State Drives

• Intel® Converged Network Adapters

Solution Provided By:

1 WordStream, May 2018, “37 Staggering Video Marketing Statistics for 2018.” https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/03/08/video- marketing-statistics

2 Cisco, September 2017, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021.” https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/

collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/complete-white-paper-c11-481360.html

3 https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/xeonscalable-platform-brief.pdf

4 https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/mobile-viewpoint-hevc-live-broadcasting-solution-using-intel-media-server-studio All information provided here is subject to change without notice. Contact your Intel representative to obtain the latest Intel product

specifications and roadmaps.

Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation. Performance varies depending on system configuration. No computer system can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer, or learn more at intel.com.

Cost reduction scenarios described are intended as examples of how a given Intel- based product, in the specified circumstances and configurations, may affect future costs and provide cost savings. Circumstances will vary. Intel does not guarantee any costs or cost reduction.

Optimization Notice: Intel’s compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations.

Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel.

Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.

Notice Revision #20110804

Copyright © 2019 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, Iris, and Optane are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

© Intel Corporation 0219/JOPD/CAT/PDF 338399-001EN

provides high performance and easy manageability. This and other solutions are based on real-world experience gathered from customers who have successfully tested, piloted, and/

or deployed the solutions in specific use cases. The solutions architects and technology experts for this solution reference architecture include:

• Fulcan Fong, Lead Solution Architect – Media as a Service, Cloud Service Providers – Technical Solution Sales

• Marc Clevenger, Cloud Solution Architect, Acceleration Solutions, Data Center Group

Intel Solutions Architects are technology experts who work with some of the world’s largest and most successful companies to design business solutions that solve pressing business challenges. These solutions are based on real-world experience gathered from customers who have successfully tested, piloted, and/or deployed these solutions in specific business use cases.

Find the solution that is right for your organization. Contact your Intel representative or visit intel.com/VisualCloud