Intel VCA2 with three Xeon CPUs pictured
Roman Der8auer Hartung bought Intel Visual Compute Accelerator (VCA) 2 though eBay. Although it may look like a graphics card, it definitely is not. It’s a purpose build accelerator for the ‘visual cloud’.
Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2, Source: der8auer
Intel VCA2 is a sophisticated enterprise device build for cloud computing. Users can install Windows or Linux instances and connect directly to the device remotely. It is therefore a device to lower the cost for businesses that allow multiple users to use the card’s resources, either for work or remote gaming.
The VCA2 is not a new product, it was released in 2016 and has already been discontinued. The VCA accelerators were build for QuickSync video acceleration through integrated Iris Pro P580 graphics.
Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2, Source: der8auer
The device itself supports up to 44 streams at 1080p resolution and using H264 codec, or up to 14 simultaneously stream at 4K. To achieve this, the board is equipped with three quad-core Xeon E-1585L v5 processors rated at 45W TDP based on Skylake architecture. Each processor is attached to its own SO-DIMM memory bank (up to 64GB DDR4 per card). This is then connected the PLX chipsets to share a single PCIe 3.0 x16 interface.
Der8auer has made some progress in making the device show up in the system, but is yet to find the full software solution to utilize the device the way it was intended. Should any of our readers know how to run this device, make sure to let Roman know.
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