Intel^?recently released a white paper on FFmpeg Linux transcoding performance with Intel Quick Sync Video using the Intel Media Server Studio on the Intel Xeon^?E3-1285L v4 processor.

This white paper details the trade-offs in transcode speed vs. quality and shows the Xeon E3-1285L v4 is a great workhorse for this type of application.

Why might Cisco UCS customers care? With the Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers, you can get eight M1414 cartridges with this CPU in 2RU.

M-Series servers are part of Cisco's composable infrastructure line of products. You can right size the compute or storage to the application. In this case, using Intel Xeon E3 v4 processors with integrated graphics provides just the right amount of CPU/graphics power for the video transcoding application. This provides an incredibly dense transcoding solution. Much denser than you could get with an E5 based solution using PCIe based graphics accelerators.

Another great benefit of M-Series is the common management model with other Cisco UCS servers. Regardless of form factor, B-Series blades, C-Series rack, or M-Series modular servers, a single management framework is used. Why should you have to have separate tools and processes just because you change form factor? Other server vendors simply can't do this.

I hope you'll take the time to check out the Intel white paper and explore if the M-Series Modular servers are right for your transcoding (or other) application needs.