2020 Tokyo Olympics streamed in 8K 60FPS, on 4 x Intel Xeon servers

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics saw 8K 60FPS HDR video being broadcasted, right up into the cloud -- all powered by Intel Xeon CPUs.

2

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.

2

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.