Advantech Introduces Carrier Grade Server Platform to Provide Higher Channel Density for 4K and HEVC Solutions

Industry leading capacity is provided by four full-length, full height PCIe cards, plus two half-length, full height cards for additional offload or or high bandwidth Ethernet network connectivity. Using only 2RU of rackspace, the system is a compact, cost effective, highly available platform optimized for next-generation telecom and video infrastructure designs requiring Digital Signal Processing payloads such as the Advantech DSPC-8681 and DSPC-8682 for high density video encoding/decoding, transcoding and transrating applications.

“The rapid rise of 4K support in the latest TVs and tablets plus the ability of broadcast cameras to capture higher definition images, means that infrastructure equipment providers now need systems which pack more overall processing power into the same physical footprint.” said David Lin, Senior Director DSP solutions, Advantech. “The CGS-6000 brings the additional x86 application performance which customers need, plus more space and superior cooling to host over thirty-two TI TMS320C6678 DSPs for accelerated media processing.”

Powered by two Intel Xeon Processor E5 Series CPUs, the CGS-6000 is designed for long system lifecycles with the built-in ruggedness and reliability required by operators in carrier-grade installations. The CGS-6000 also provides advanced front-to rear-cooling.

“HEVC (H.265) encoding requires significantly more processing power than H.264, so getting equipment vendors on a fast track for development is key to helping them accelerate their design cycles and get to market faster.” said Lin, “Advantech’s DSP solutions team is leveraging our networking and communications team’s experience in carrier grade platform design to deliver systems with the right balance of performance, I/O and storage which will help equipment providers to redefine the video landscape and enhance the overall user experience.”

TI provides a Multicore Video Software Development Kit to get developers going quickly with optimized coding implementations. The kit provides the framework to launch Codecs on Advantech DSPC-8681 and DSPC-8682 PCIe cards and fully supports encode, decode and transcode modes. A range of graphics and text overlay, frame-rate conversion and spatial resizing examples help speed coding. The package is designed with scalability in mind, and can run in single-core, multicore, and multi-device modes for higher resolution, higher sampling and higher color-depth workloads.