The YouTube blog recently posted a post in which the streaming service reveals the details of its device, hidden from users. The global platform faces a daunting challenge – it has to deal with huge volumes of videos that are uploaded, stored, and must be instantly available to millions of creators and billions of viewers. In this case, you have to recode the video, adapting it to the capabilities and preferences of the client.
The scale of the problem can be assessed by only two indicators: about 500 hours of video are uploaded to the platform per minute, and more than 2 billion users visit it every month. Unsurprisingly, the capabilities of conventional hardware aren’t enough to handle this. This is why dedicated video transcoding ICs called VCU (Video [trans] Coding Units). The processor, dubbed Argos, is 20-30 times more efficient than the “conventional server platform”. In YouTube datacenters, these chips are used in PCIe expansion cards for servers, where they are installed in two.
The illustration below gives an idea of ​​the structure of Argos. It includes I / O and memory controllers, a CPU for flow control, three decoder cores and ten encoder cores. Each encoder core is capable of real-time video encoding at 2160p and 60fps using three reference frames.
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