Visual Compute Accelerator

One of Intel’s more interesting products over the recent years was its range of Visual Compute Accelerator cards, designed to help cloud streaming and encoding/decoding of HD and UHD video. These cards were built on the QuickSync principle, using Intel’s integrated graphics to accelerate the process, but also using special Xeons with added eDRAM (known as Crystalwell) to help accelerate the process. These cards fit into a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, and used a switch to control them, as well as shuttling data across the PCIe bus. They were launched in 2017, and now Intel is putting them onto the End-Of-Life track for product discontinuance. These cards were geared towards the cloud video streaming market, and contained three E3-1585L v5 processors inside with Iris Pro...