By Gabby Chen

(JW Insights) Apr 18 -- Chinese tech giant Tencent Cloud's self-developed video transcoding chip Canghai has entered mass production, it announced on April 17.

Tens of thousands of Canghai chips have been put into use, serving clients in various areas, including cloud gaming and video live streaming. The chip was first developed in early 2019 and passed tests in March of last year.

The Canghai chip can significantly enhance image quality compared to hardware with GPUs at the same bit rate. The chip also achieved a new industry-leading level by reducing the bit rate by over 10% while maintaining the same quality in the high frame rate of 120fps.

Its encoding time for a single frame of 1080p video is only four milliseconds, and the throughput performance remains unaffected by encoding parameters or video types, said Tencent Cloud.

In addition, Tencent's Canghai chip won all eight top scores in two categories at the latest MSU Video Codecs Comparison held by Moscow State University after months of rigorous testing, said a Pandaily report on April 17.

Tencent has a long-term chip development and investment plan for scenarios with strong business needs. Besides Canghai, the company has also designed an AI reasoning chip - Zixiao, and a high-performance network chip - Xuanling.

The Zixiao chip has already been successfully deployed by the company to handle a range of internal business operations, delivering up to three times the computing acceleration performance and more than 45% overall cost savings.

Its Xuanling chip achieved zero occupancy of the CPU and boosted performance by up to four times, helping the company to build its next generation of high-performance network infrastructure, according to Tencent Cloud.