Inside Tencent’s Breakthrough AI, Video, and Network Chips: Performance Gains Revealed
At the 2021 Tencent Digital Ecology Conference, senior executives unveiled three home‑grown chips—ZiXiao for AI inference, CangHai for video transcoding, and XuanLing for high‑performance networking—detailing their 2.5D HBM2e integration, accelerated codecs, and up to four‑fold performance improvements that position Tencent’s custom silicon as a core infrastructure for cloud services.
Tencent announced its self‑developed chip progress at the 2021 Tencent Digital Ecology Conference, revealing three home‑grown silicon products.
ZiXiao is an AI inference chip designed for image and video processing, natural language processing, and recommendation scenarios. It adopts 2.5D packaging that integrates HBM2e memory with the AI core, and adds dedicated computer‑vision and video codec accelerators to overcome performance bottlenecks.
CangHai is a video transcoding chip. Its algorithm implements high‑precision motion search, full‑rate distortion optimization, and efficient adaptive quantization, combined with Tencent Cloud encoder rate‑control technology. A flexible multi‑core architecture, high‑performance encoding pipeline, and hierarchical memory layout enable high throughput, low latency, and real‑time processing. In the MSU 2020 World Codec Competition, CangHai achieved first place in SSIM, PSNR, VMAF, and subjective visual quality.
XuanLing is an intelligent network‑card chip aimed at accelerating cloud‑host performance for CVM, BM, and container workloads. By offloading virtualization, network and storage I/O functions from the main CPU to the chip, it achieves zero CPU occupancy.
Performance highlights announced include a 100 % improvement for ZiXiao over industry benchmarks, a more than 30 % higher compression ratio for CangHai, and a four‑fold performance boost for XuanLing.
Senior executive Tang Daosheng emphasized that “chips are the most core part of hardware and the fundamental infrastructure of the industrial internet,” and confirmed Tencent’s ongoing long‑term investment in chip R&D.
Since 2020, Tencent’s Penglai Lab has focused on end‑to‑end chip design and verification, and the company has also invested in cloud AI chip startup Suoyuan Technology. Tencent plans to co‑build an ecosystem with domestic and international chip firms, combining custom silicon and software to deliver optimal performance and cost‑effectiveness.
Tencent Architect
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