With the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in Paris only days away, the entire planet is preparing to watch their home teams square off in the greatest competition in the world. And while the Olympians focus on bringing home the gold, Intel is working hard to bring 8K video resolution into your home.
Intel is the Official Worldwide AI Platform Partner of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris this year, and the company has quite a lot planned for the games. Perhaps the biggest news to come out of this is Intel’s partnership with the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) to use AI to provide 8K live streaming of the Olympic events to the global audience.
Throughout the games, AI-optimized broadcast servers will encode and compress OBS-produced 8K live signals that OBS will then bring to certain media outlets via the internet. This is an enormous challenge that Intel feels ready to overcome.
Compressing live data and decoding it at 8K resolution is an impressive feat of engineering. Intel is taking these live raw feeds (which measure at 48Gbps) and compressing them into a VVC0-enabled livestream measuring 40-60 Mbps. This is a compression ratio of 1,000x, and it needs to happen in under 400 milliseconds.
This 8K over-the-top broadcast is then distributed by OBS all over the globe to 8K TVs that are connected to Intel-enabled PCs.
The broadcast servers used in this effort are powered by 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors (Emerald Rapids) and 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors (Sapphire Rapids), with Intel AI accelerators (AMX) and Deep Learning Boost technology.
Ravindra Velhal, global content technology strategist and 8K lead at Intel, stated in Intel’s article on the topic, that this will be the first live demonstration of end-to-end 8K VVC live streaming that utilizes Intel’s 5th Gen Xeon CPUs to encode and Intel-based client CPUs and Arc GPUs to decode.
These AI-optimized broadcast servers are certainly impressive, but they are not the only way AI will be used at the games.
Intel is also creating an interactive, fan-powered activation that shows viewers what it's like to become an Olympic athlete. Intel’s AI Platform Experience – which is trained on Intel Gaudi accelerators, runs on Intel Xeon Processors with built-in AI acceleration and optimization with OpenVINO – will use AI tools and computer vision to analyze athletic drills to match a user’s profile to an Olympic sport.
Additionally, Intel is using AI to bring about a more accessible experience for the visually impaired. With AI built on Intel Xeon, 3D models of both the Team USA High-Performance Centre in Paris and the International Paralympic Committee headquarters in Bonn, Germany will give users a voice navigation experience via a smartphone application.
