The NPEngine from Toshiba has a big future for content providers who would be interested in streaming thousands of concurrent videos and save on space and power requirements.  The quote from the article at The Register claims a 70% reduction in size and a 77% reduction in power consumption for a provider who could provide 100,000 separate streams.  That savings demonstrates the benefit of purpose built hardware, what it lacks in versatility it more than makes up for in savings.  The server version is due out this year, with the possibility of a single chip version for laptops and SFF machines which will take the CPU completely out of the picture when playing HD video.

"Toshiba’s NPEngine hardware directly streams video from SSDs to IP networks without using host server CPU cycles or memory.

Tosh claims the dedicated hardware delivers up to 64,000 x 40Gbit/sec video streams – way more than the 20,000 or so an average 2U server is said to be able to stream. The Toshiba hardware, a server card, can replace at least two video-streaming servers and enable its host server to do other work."

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