The developer-focused cloud computing infrastructure provider Akamai Technologies Inc. today announced the availability of a new industry-optimized service based on Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing units that’s dedicated to media workloads.

It leverages the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada generation GPU to provide maximum performance efficiency and economics for customers in the media industry, encoding, decoding and processing video faster at lower prices than standard virtual machines. Akamai says internal benchmarks show that the new service is capable of performing GPU-based encoding tasks up to 25 times faster than traditional central processing unit-based encoding.

That makes the new service ideal for video streaming service providers. According to Akamai, the new service is designed to empower media providers with a more scalable and resilient architecture for streaming video using its highly distributed edge network with integrated content delivery.

According to Akamai, there’s a growing need for this kind of industry-optimized GPU service. It says the media industry is underserved by today’s cloud computing providers, which have largely focused their extensive but still limited GPU resources on catering to artificial intelligence workloads such as large language model training and inference. Yet Nvidia’s GPUs, although ideal for AI, can also be fine-tuned to meet the specific needs and demands of the media and entertainment industry.

For instance, the Nvidia RTX 4000 GPU is uniquely able to perform faster-than-real-time transcoding of live video streams, resulting in much better streaming performance by reducing buffering and enabling faster playback. That’s because the RTX 4000 GPUs are equipped with Nvidia’s latest NVENC and NVDEC hardware, while providing additional capacity for simultaneous encoding and decoding tasks, enabling it to support higher throughput in video processing tasks.

Other media-focused use cases include virtual reality and augmented reality content, which demand high-quality rendering of 3D graphics and multimedia content in real-time.

Akamai Vice President of Cloud Products Shawn Michels said media companies need access to low-latency and reliable computing resources that can ensure the portability of the workloads they power. “Nvidia’s GPUs provide superior price performance when deployed on Akamai’s global edge network,” he said.

Akamai is also well-placed to deliver its GPU services from hundreds of globally distributed edge locations, as its cloud infrastructure leverages its content delivery network. The company began life as a CDN provider and remains a leader in that industry, but following its $900 million acquisition of Lindoe LLC, it has since expanded to deliver cloud computing services through its Connected Cloud infrastructure platform.

Akamai claims to offer the world’s most widely distributed cloud infrastructure, surpassing that of rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Cloud, as it can host its services in the hundreds of locations its CDN encompasses.

Although Akamai says its Nvidia RTX 4000 GPU-based service is dedicated to media workloads, that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for other tasks. For instance, the new service can also support generative AI training and inference, thanks to its inclusion of more than 20 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, which provides the extensive capacity required by LLMs and their datasets.

Other workloads it can support include data analysis, video games and graphics rendering, and high-performance computing tasks such as scientific simulations and calculations, the company said.

“In order to support a wide range of workloads, you need a wide array of compute instances,” Michels said. “What we’re doing with industry-optimized GPUs is one of the many steps we’re taking for our customers to increase instance diversity across the entire continuum of compute to drive and power edge-native applications.”

Image: Nvidia