The 8K live broadcast service of the Tokyo Olympics uses servers built by Intel Xeon processors

At the just-concluded Tokyo Olympics, helicopters were used for the first time to shoot the opening and closing ceremonies with 8K cameras, and 8K live broadcasts were realized in some competitions such as track and field, badminton, football, judo, swimming, and volleyball. This is also the broadcast trend of future large-scale events.

In order to realize the 8K broadcast at the Tokyo Olympics, Japan began preparations very early. At the Red and White Songs in 2019, NHK announced the full opening of 8K channels. At this stage, the 8K live broadcast is more about technology display, which is still a little far away from the general public.  According to VideoCardz reports, the Tokyo Olympics was transmitted to the cloud at 8K, 60fps and HDR, and recorded in 4x12G SDI format (occupying 48GB of storage space per second), which is the original uncompressed input (10bit/ycbcr422). Then it will be compressed into two formats, namely HEVC 250 Mbps (ycbcr420) and a similar format with a bit rate of 50~100Mbps

The encoding server used this time is equipped with four Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H processors, each with 28 cores and 56 threads (four processors with a total of 112 cores and 224 threads), L3 cache is 38.5MB, basic frequency is 2.9GHz, turbo frequency is 4.3GHz, TDP is 250W. The server is equipped with 480GB Intel Optane 900P SSD and 384GB DDR4-3200 memory. Perhaps this is a bit surprising. After all, many streaming media and codec servers will use dedicated GPUs to complete these tasks. In many people’s perceptions, GPUs can process such tasks faster than CPUs in most cases.

Most parts of the world do not use 8K signal to broadcast like NHK, generally 4K at most. The requirements for playing such an 8K video are not low, and an 8K TV equipped with HDMI 2.1 interface is required. The recommended playback device is configured with an Intel Xeon W-2295 processor (18 cores and 36 threads) with 64GB of memory.