The new AMD Alveo MA35D delivers up to 32x 1080p60 streams per card, as well as offers both power efficiency and ultra-low-latency performance. Compared to the previous generation Alveo U30 media accelerator, the Alveo MA35D can deliver up to 4x higher channel density with 4x maximum lower latency in 4K, as well as 1.8x greater compression efficiency, all at the same VMAF score.

"We worked closely with our customers and partners to understand not just their technical requirements, but their infrastructure challenges in deploying high-volume, interactive streaming services profitably," said Dan Gibbons, general manager of AECG Data Center Group, AMD. "We developed the Alveo MA35D with an ASIC architecture tailored to meet the bespoke needs of these providers to reduce both capital and operating expenses for delivering immersive experiences to their users and content creators at scale."

Since it features a purpose-built VPU, it does all video processing on the card, minimizing the data movement between the CPU and the accelerator, reducing overall latency and raising the channel density to 32x 1080p60, 8x 4Kp60, or 4x 8Kp30 streams per card. It supports the mainstream H.264 and H.265 codecs, as well as the new AV1 transcoder engines.

"AMD's announcement of the new Alveo MA35D add-in card is an exciting advancement of video acceleration for data centers and is an important step in building out a fully-fledged ecosystem to support royalty-free, high-definition video devices, products, and services," said Matt Frost, Alliance for Open Media Chair. "Live streaming providers are looking for higher density, lower power, lower latency AV1 solutions and by addressing these, Alliance members such as AMD are helping facilitate AV1 deployment and overall adoption."

The Alveo MA35D also features an integrated AI processor and dedicated video quality engines, used to evaluate content, frame-by-frame, and dynamically adjust encoder settings to improve perceived visual quality while minimizing bitrate. It also features region-of-interest (ROI) encoding for text and face resolution, artifact detection to correct scenes with high levels of motion and complexity, and content-aware encoding for predictive insights for bitrate optimization.

The platform is accessible with the AMD Media Acceleration software development kit (SDK), supporting the widely used FFmpeg and Gstreamer video frameworks for ease of development.

The AMD Alveo MA35D media accelerators are sampling now with production shipments expected in Q3. While AMD did not announce the price, some rumors put it at $1,595.