ew 2024: Matrox Empowers Intelligent Video Processing

Tell us more about Matrox and its primary customers.

Jochen Köhl: - Matrox as a company is a component provider, so our customers are twofold. On the one hand, we’re selling to OEMs that take our building block to build our own solutions out of it, but we also have a channel business. The entire world is becoming a video world, and it’s not only since the pandemic, but video is in everybody’s daily routine life. So the number of video streams is ever growing, and that’s the challenge, of course, for partners and for system buildings a lot. The challenge obviously is the variety that you have in the video world. There is different codecs, there’s different resolutions, different standards.

What are the most challenging aspects of today’s video processing systems?

Jochen Köhl: If you think about broadcast quality video, that is uncompressed down to a very high compression, H.264. There’s a huge variety of coders, of technologies, and obviously a huge variety of of use cases. The second thing is the network in between makes a massive difference if you transfer video in a local area network, if you go from building to building on a campus or even cross-country or deep cross-continent, even. And then you have the difference between the public internet and privately owned networks like a VPN that you frequently use. So huge variety of technologies and use cases. That’s, of course, the problem.

What is the value of Intel in addressing some of those challenges?

Jochen Köhl: What we described as a problem before, obviously Intel is part of the solution. Matrox is building products that help the management of video. And why are we using Intel? For us, we are using Intel primarily for the encoding and decoding engine that the Arc GPUs contain. So our regular graphic cards that we use is doing about 40 streams in parallel decoding on a video wall, which is one of our major application areas that we’re in. That is huge. So it’s helping on the encoding, on the decoding. It gives us density. Every card we have is a single slot, so we scale up between multiples of cards and in multiples of number of codecs and displays. So part of the fix of the problem we described is the Arc GPU on our LUMA series.

What is Matrox doing to help customers streamline and scale video processing solutions?

Jochen Köhl: The streamline is pretty similar to what I described. It’s the number of streams and the density, the number of cards that you can put into a single system. Starting from small, we are embedded world here. So we start from embedded small form factor systems. We have a graphics card that also does the same encoding and decoding performance and you put them in a very small form factor case chassis as a starting point. Behind me, don’t know if you can really see it, we also have 19-inch racks where we have multiple cards in there to get to huge video wall installations, many, many displays on the output side, but many different sources that we bring in and that are encoded or decoded at the same time up to the video wall or into the LAN for redistribution.

What is the value of embedded world 2024 for Matrox?

Jochen Köhl: For Matrox video, it is the second time that we are on embedded world and the mission for us here obviously is to get in touch with all the system builders that are building the chassis for that is equally a component for a total solution. As I said in beginning, Matrox is a component vendor. The chassis itself is a second component and sort of the interest of the chassis maker and us as the card maker is to sell to solution providers. Those are the ones that we intend to find here on the show, and so far so good. It’s the second day. So we’re happy with the outcome so far that we achieved.