Explore
The goal is to determine whether Quadra VPUs are a technical and economic fit for your video workloads before you invest time in testing or integration (you are not here to prove VPUs work). This stage is about qualification in your environment, not commitment.
Teams that skip this step almost always benchmark the wrong thing and draw the wrong conclusions.
What you’re solving for
Before touching hardware or benchmarks, get clear on the constraints driving your evaluation. VPUs only matter when one of these constraints is already breaking your system.
Typical drivers include:
- CPU or GPU encoding cost growth
- Power, rack, or cooling limits
- Density ceilings (streams per server)
- Codec transitions (AV1 and HEVC at scale)
- Operational unpredictability under load
Where VPUs fit
Quadra VPUs replace video compute, not platforms. They slot into existing pipelines where encoding or transcoding is the bottleneck:
- Live or file-based ingest
- FFmpeg/GStreamer-based workflows
- Cloud, on-prem, hybrid or edge deployments
Everything up and downstream remains as is. This is a compute substitution. Your workflow stays intact.
Key questions to answer now
You should be able to answer these before moving on:
- Which workloads are encoding/decoding-bound today?
- What codecs, resolutions, and frame rates matter in production—not theory?
- Where does cost or density break first as scale increases?
- Which environments must remain unchanged (cloud provider, on-prem, compliance)?
If these aren’t clear, pause here. Testing without these answers produces benchmarks you can’t trust.
What you don’t need yet
If you’re looking for certainty right now, you’re too early. At this stage, you do not need:
- Final architecture decisions
- Production-sized infrastructure
- Vendor lock-in commitments
- Performance tuning beyond baseline comparisons
Those come later.
The most common failures we see at this stage:
- Skipping constraint definition Testing without clear cost, density, or power limits produces meaningless results.
- Starting with non-representative workloads Easy content hides real bottlenecks.
- Misaligning on success criteria Share the “good” accomplishments to stay on track.
Option: Hire Professional Services
Custom Integration to Unblock Your VPU Deployment Challenges
- Deep-dive discovery to map every system in your stack
- Custom-built integration that unlocks peak VPU performance
- Relentless testing to ensure a flawless production handoff
Ask us to introduce you to one of our VPU Ecosystem Partners to perform these services.
Outputs of the Explore stage
When this step is complete, you should have:
- A short list of candidate workloads for testing
- A clear deployment environment (cloud, on-prem, hybrid, edge)
- A defined success metric (cost per stream, streams per server, watts per stream)
- Internal alignment on why VPUs are being evaluated