Intel at Olympics 2024

Intel plans to enable 8K video resolution to improve the broadcasting experience during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, as the Official Worldwide AI Platform Partner.

Intel AI accelerator (AMX) and Deep Learning Boost technology, which are included in 5th and 4th generation Intel Xeon processors (Emerald Rapids and Sapphire Rapids, respectively), are the technologies that enable all of this.

In less than 400 milliseconds, these AI-optimized broadcast servers will compress live 48 Gbps raw feeds into 40–60 Mbps VVC-enabled livestreams with a 1,000:1 compression ratio. Intel Arc GPUs and PCs with Intel Core i9 processors will decode the content in real time.

A few Olympics featured video processing done in part by Intel. Intel processed 41.7 petabytes of data to power 416 hours of live and recorded content during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. An 8K virtual reality feed was unveiled by Intel during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

Intel plans to showcase the first-ever live, end-to-end 8K VVC livestreaming in Paris Olympics 2024. To achieve this, the company will use the newest Xeon CPUs for encoding, along with Intel-based client CPUs and Arc GPUs for decoding.

Intel, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), and international broadcasters have partnered to demonstrate how live 8K broadcasts can be made feasible.

Naturally, it calls for a significant technological investment and a lot of firepower, which Intel is undoubtedly subsidizing for this demonstration.