Akamai is adding support for video processing units (VPUs) based on a set of ASICs developed by NETINT Technologies within a set of Akamai Cloud Accelerated Compute Instances being launched today.
Ari Weil, vice president of product marketing for Akamai, said that as video becomes more integrated into almost every application experience, the need for a new class of processors to optimize processing of this type of data has reached a tipping point. Akamai is the first cloud service provider to incorporate ASICs from NETINT into its cloud service, Weil said.
The ASICs from NETINT are being integrated into a Quadra T1U VPU, a single-chip solution that supports video encoding resolutions of up to 8Kp60 in formats such as AV1, HEVC, and H.264 with 8/10 bit support, including high dynamic range (HDR) video. It can encode 32 live streams at 1080p30 broadcast quality, with the capacity scaling linearly for resolutions above or below high-definition (HD) rates.
In addition to offloading the processing of video from CPUs to VPUs that provide as much as 20 times greater throughput at ten times less cost, the Quadra T1U VPUs also significantly reduce the overall amount of energy required, noted Weil. That capability frees up more capacity for CPUs to then handle tasks such as dynamic packaging, de-interlacing, real-time speech-to-text captioning and software decoding for standards that are enabled by a VPU, he added.
Akamai is adding VPUs to a range of classes of processors, including graphics processing units (GPUs), that it makes available in the cloud and at the network edge. That’s critical because the amount of video now being generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools has surged to 41%, compared to 18% in 2024. Given the large number of developers of gaming applications and providers of media services that already rely on the Akamai content delivery network (CDN), VPUs are a natural extension of the Akamai portfolio, Weil noted.
The overall goal is to bring processing and storage services as close as possible to where data is being created, consumed and analyzed. NETINT has been steadily gaining traction via alliances but is now, via a partnership with Akamai, moving toward making its ASIC available as a cloud instance.
Video is already employed across a wide range of applications, but as the cost of creating it continues to decline, the volume of this type of data increases exponentially. Naturally, storing all that data is presenting IT teams with a new set of data management challenges at a time when the total cost of cloud storage continues to rise significantly.
Ultimately, IT teams will need to find ways to not only reduce the cost of processing video, but also storing it. In fact, going forward it’s probable that there will be some type of video incorporated into almost every application.
The challenge is that most of the IT infrastructure being relied on today to process and store that data wasn’t created with the unique requirements of video in mind.
