Macnica recently launched its MEP100, a 100Gb SmartNIC solution aimed at hardware and software product developers in the broadcast and ProAV sectors. The MEP100 SmartNIC card has an FPGA hardware acceleration engine “that offers product developers significant advantages over software-based alternatives”. Macnica provides an example saying, “ST 2110 IP packets are processed within the MEP100’s FPGA IP core architecture, freeing valuable CPU resources for the intended application.”
This shows that the solution can transfer video, audio, and data directly to and from the host CPU and GPU memory and the SmartNIC card versus utilizing the CPU’s operating system resources. “That full ST 2110 stack can include performance-focused IP networking applications including PTP timing (for synchronization), network path redundancy, and on-board JPEG-XS compression. The latter, available soon, will support visually lossless, low-latency media transport for greater channel density through the card.”
The MEP100 is made using Altera Agilex 7 FPGAs to handle some of the most bandwidth- and compute-intensive applications. The solution is shipped with Macnica’s M2S SDK which is a flexible media streaming software development kit that works with all major network hardware. The M2S SDK provides a simplistic and intuitive API for sending and receiving media data on more generalized PC and software platforms making the MEP100 worthy of IPMX product development. IPMX is a suite of standards based on ST 2110, but with more flexibility that opens product development opportunities involving asynchronous devices.
“The MEP100 delivers a special and unique stream processing solution for ST 2110 product developers that are ready to develop today,” said Andrew Starks, Director of Product Development, Macnica. “With professional features that optimize performance for live broadcasts, large-scale production environments and much more, the MEP100 is an ideal SmartNIC solution for developers that want to bring their own high-end hardware products to market, or integrate a reliable media transport solution within PC workstations for deployment in broadcast or ProAV environments.”
Starks also states that broadcast infrastructure equipment, vision and presentation switchers, and image mapping systems represent possible high-end hardware products ready for development utilizing Macnica’s MEP100.