How Intel’s End‑to‑End Audio‑Video Optimizations Power the Next Cloud Media Experience

On August 18, 2022, the NetEase Audio‑Video Technology Conference highlighted the rapid growth of audio‑video services, with short‑video usage reaching 25.7% of internet time and the ultra‑HD video market projected to exceed 4 trillion CNY in 2022. Intel expert Zhang Liyu presented an end‑to‑end audio‑video optimization roadmap.

Guest Introduction: Zhang Liyu, Intel Internet Industry Solutions Specialist, has long focused on audio‑video infrastructure, including video encoding, analysis, and performance tuning.

As live‑streaming technology matures, video interaction and smooth playback have become standard, replacing text‑ and image‑centric content streams with rich multimedia. Optimizing ultra‑HD live and on‑demand streams is a major challenge for delivering superior user experiences.

To meet evolving application scenarios, audio‑video technology must continuously upgrade both software systems and underlying hardware. Intel addresses this with a two‑layer strategy: a robust hardware foundation and a comprehensive software acceleration stack.

On the hardware side, Intel leverages Xeon Scalable processors, FPGA products, Optane persistent memory, Ethernet adapters, and Visual Cloud Media Accelerator cards to deliver strong compute, storage, and networking capabilities for cloud‑based video services.

On the software side, Intel provides Media SDK, SVT, and oneAPI, offering a full‑stack solution that accelerates audio‑video workloads across diverse use cases.

Intel also supplies integrated data function libraries such as IPP, which can perform discrete cosine transforms (DCT) with up to three‑fold performance gains using AVX‑512 instructions, reducing code size and memory usage.

Overall, Intel’s hardware acts as a performance accelerator—combining Xeon CPUs, FPGA, and Optane—to provide powerful compute, storage, and network resources, while the software stack serves as a system optimizer, delivering efficient encoding/decoding and enabling cloud or data‑center platforms to offer high‑quality, affordable streaming services.

Looking ahead, Intel envisions data‑center architectures that separate compute and storage physically, integrate security features at the chip level, and adopt micro‑service‑based software to support seamless cloud‑to‑edge connectivity, AI workloads, and continuous innovation.