The 2020 Tokyo Olympics saw 8K 60FPS HDR video being broadcasted, right up into the cloud -- all powered by Intel Xeon CPUs.
8K 60FPS HDR streams aren't easy, with the encoding servers that Intel provided were powered by 4 x Xeon 8380H processors -- each of these CPUs has 28 cores and 56 threads. Each individual encoding server would then have 112 cores and 224 threads, with a super-fast 480GB Intel Optane 900P SSD and 384GB of DDR4-3200 memory.
All of the 8K 60FPS HDR streaming and decoding was done on the CPU exclusively, with no discrete GPU used. That's a pretty big deal right there. Intel recommended that for 8K playback capability requires an 8K TV -- well, duh -- and HDMI 2.1 connectivity. As for the recommended PC specs for 8K video playback, Intel recommends their in-house Xeon W-2295 processor with 18 cores and 36 threads and 64GB of RAM.
The broadcasts themselves were recorded in 4x12G SDI format with every single second of the Olympics taking up an insane 48GB of storage space, with this being a raw input of uncompressed video with 4:2:2 chroma subsampling with 10-bit color.
From there, this uncompressed video is encoded in two different formats: contribution signal with 4:2:0 subsampling using HEVC 250 Mbps format and distribution signal at 50-100 Mbps with the same subsampling.
