While Intel has no way to properly release its Arc graphics cards on the market, it has shown how it intends to use its new DG2 GPUs for other purposes.
The company has shown a line of Arctic Sound-M gas pedals, based on the same graphics processors that should be used in gaming solutions. Only Arctic Sound-M are not aimed at games at all. These are quite unusual gas pedals, as their task is to transcode video. Intel itself calls these gas pedals media supercomputers.
Arctic Sound-M supports up to eight simultaneous 4K streams or up to thirty 1080p streams. Thus, Intel and other companies can potentially use such solutions for game streaming services, among others.
As a reminder, Intel’s Arc family GPUs support hardware encoding of the AV1 format, which Intel promoted by showing Arctic Sound-M. As a result, using this codec reduces the load on the GPU by 30%. To be more precise, bitrate is reduced from 64.7 Mbit/s with H.264 to 44.9 Mbit/s with AV1.
What exact GPU is used in Arctic Sound-M, whether there will be one model in the lineup or several, and when such gas pedals will hit the market is not yet known. However, we can note the presence of a single eight-pin power connector, so it’s definitely not about the most basic configuration of DG2.