The emergence of 8K cameras and the capture of higher resolution images is slowly driving the rest of the media workflow to handle 8K content. But the exponential costs of moving, processing, and storing the vast amounts of data associated with 8K content is causing many to question whether the return on investment in new equipment and infrastructure is worth it.

Technology continues to enable us to capture and share content with increasing fidelity as each generation of mobile phone, television, or camera is released. With the latest equipment, 8K ultra-high definition (8K UHD) is becoming more common amongst professionals and consumers alike. In our previous blog we discussed why and where 8K resolutions are being adopted today, as the leading edge of a larger wave of immersive media technology.   

The adoption of 8K video creates new challenges for designers of equipment that need to ingest, process, and transmit 8K video.

To ingest and transmit 8K video, interfaces must deliver four times the bandwidth of their 4K predecessors, resulting in interfaces with more data lanes, higher speeds, or both. AMD Versal™ adaptive SoCs (System-on-Chips) are well suited to such interfaces (those with line rates of 20 Gbps or more) because they offer GTY or GTYP transceivers that are capable of rates up to 32 Gbps, which is a capability that was limited to only larger devices in the previous generation of adaptive SoCs. Examples of these high-rate interfaces include DisplayPort™ 2.1 and SMPTE ST 2110

8K has emerged as the latest standard in ultra-high definition (UHD) video, offering four times the resolution of 4K and sixteen times the resolution of Full HD (Figure 1). While it may have seemed like overkill at first, 8K video is gaining traction in professional media and emerging in consumer applications. In this blog series, we'll explore why 8K video is being adopted, its benefits and potential drawbacks, the technical challenges of connecting, processing and compressing 8K content, and how AMD platforms are enabling the next wave of immersive viewing capabilities.  

Industry 5.0 is revolutionizing manufacturing. Future 6G wireless networks will connect us in new and exciting ways. And artificial intelligence is poised to transform every part of our lives.

We don’t yet know how advances in these and other areas will change our world. But we do know that AMD, building on years of leadership from Xilinx, will be there to help enable every groundbreaking technology that innovators dream up.

AMD acts as a catalyst, making next-generation compute technology a reality through high-performance emulation and prototyping. Time after time, we build breakthrough hardware—adaptive SoCs and FPGAs—designed to facilitate verification of increasingly complex semiconductors and shift software validation to the left in the design cycle.

AMD’s new technology platform solution will allow security speeds to match the performance required within modern networks.

AMD is introducing the Versal™ Premium series VPK180 Evaluation Kit with over 4Tb/s of bandwidth using 112G PAM4 transceivers and industry-standard connectors. The kit comes with a comprehensive set of accessories and features many onboard interfaces to enable designers to immediately start their board development. 

In the first of our “any media over any network” series, we highlighted that support for bridging between traditional AV connectivity standards and Ethernet-based IP networks is a key function required in many multimedia systems. Next, we’ll take a closer look at the options designers have when adopting Ethernet for AV transport using AMD adaptive SoCs.

We all know that designing and prototyping with a new architecture isn’t easy, and some may wonder where to start. The good news is that there is a lot of information that users can explore on the Versal® architecture, including documents, training courses, example designs, tools, and libraries. Even better news is evaluation kits with production devices are available for anyone who wants to develop next-gen applications in 5G, data center, wired/wireless, automotive, and test & measurement.

Developing and testing Terabit Ethernet will require innovative solutions to complex technical challenges. This is to be expected. It was the same when the industry upgraded to 100Gb/s 10 years ago and when we leveled up to 400Gb/s in 2017.