Warehouse-Scale Video Acceleration

Video processing is foundational to a spectrum of important workloads: video sharing, video conferencing, photos/video archival, virtual/augmented reality, cloud gaming, and live streaming. The exponential growth in these workloads, coincident with a slowing Moore’s law, poses significant challenges to deliver more computing at higher efficiencies. In this article, we present the design of a new accelerator—the video coding unit—targeted at warehouse-scale (cloud) video transcoding. Our deployment at scale in Google, the first of its kind, has demonstrated significant benefits on several products (YouTube, Meet, Stadia, Photos, etc.) serving billions of users.