Intel VCA2 Video Card Dismantling: Three Xeons, Six Memory Rows

The German hardware god Roman “Der8auer” Hartung recently got a special thing, the Intel VCA2 video card, and immediately disassembled it.

The full name of VCA is “Visual Compute Accelerator“, the meaning of visual computing accelerator, to put it bluntly, is a video transcoding accelerator card.

There are only two generations of Intel VCA video cards. The first generation was released in 2015, and the second generation was born in 2017. It has been discontinued and delisted in 2020.

Intel VCA2 is a standard PCIe expansion card, PCIe 3.0 x16 system interface, dual turbo fans, equipped withThree special Xeon E3-1585L v5 processorsthe power consumption of the whole card is 235W.

This processor adopts 14nm process, Skylake architecture, 4 cores and 8 threads, main frequency 3.0-3.8GHz, integrated Iris Pro P580 core graphics card, eDRAM embedded cache, thermal design power consumption of 45W.

In H.264 encoding format, it supports up to 44 1080p video streams, or 14 4K video streams.

Its output interface is also very special, not HDMI, nor DisplayPort, but two RJ-45 network ports.

After disassembly, you can see thatInside are dense heat sinks and sturdy heat pipes, covering three Xeon processors lined up in a row, all packaged on a single substrate with the corresponding chipset.

Each processor also corresponds to two DDR4 SO-DIMM memory slots, a total of six, with a maximum capacity of 64GB.

Three processors connected to onePLX bridge chipand then connect to the system.

Intel VCA series products have come to an end, and Intel is currently using Xe GPU to create new video transcoding accelerator cards, such as DG2 Arctic Sound-M, which will be shipped in the middle of this year, the industry’s first integrated AV1 encoder, AI analysis computing power 150TOPS, support 8 Simultaneous transcoding streaming transmission of 4K videos and more than 30 4K videos.

Hashtag: Intel graphics card video dismantling