Tencent Self-Developed Canghai V2 Chip Enters Mass Production After Topping MSU Hardware Video Encoding Rankings
- tech360.tv
- May 29
- 2 min read
Tencent Cloud announced its self-developed Canghai series of video encoding chips took first place across all speed tiers from 30 to 240fps on every SSIM, PSNR, and VMAF metric at the Moscow State University Hardware Video Encoding competition. The Canghai chips surpassed more than 40 products from companies including AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel.
The next-generation Canghai V2 chip has been successfully powered on and has entered the mass production cycle. Full service availability for the new chip is planned for the second half of 2026.
The Moscow State University competition evaluates which encoder achieves the highest compression efficiency at equivalent quality, delivering better quality at lower bandwidth and storage costs. In an era dominated by video traffic, even marginal improvements in compression compound dramatically at scale.
The Canghai chip series focuses on full-link hardware-software co-design to continuously push compression efficiency limits without increasing hardware complexity. On the software side, Tencent continuously upgrades its rate control models based on actual hardware encoding complexity distributions. On the hardware side, pre-analysis stage content feature recognition continuously optimizes candidate encoding mode combinations.
The Canghai V1 chip entered mass production in 2023 following research and development initiation in 2019. The V1 chip is currently deployed across more than 100,000 units in Tencent Cloud and Tencent scenarios, including live streaming, video-on-demand, 4K transcoding, and cloud gaming.
Key advancements for the Canghai V2 chip include a unified architecture supporting both H.265 and H.266 encoding standards simultaneously. The H.265 standard delivers more than 10% compression improvement over V1, while the H.266 standard exceeds 30% compression improvement. The V2 chip also features doubled per-chip encoding and decoding throughput.
The V2 chip integrates end-to-end quality enhancement with on-chip CPU, GPU, and computer vision processing. This integration enables super-resolution, sharpening, dehazing, and denoising directly in the encoder pipeline. For cloud gaming, the V2 chip embeds a GPU core with render and encode sharing the same chip memory.
Tencent Cloud will make the Canghai V2 chip available to external enterprise customers through its Media Processing Service product. The chip will be available across public cloud, private cloud, and SDK deployment options.
Tencent developed the Canghai V2 video encoding chip, which has successfully entered mass production and is planned for full service availability in the second half of 2026.
The Canghai series placed first across all speed tiers from 30 to 240fps on every metric at the Moscow State University Hardware Video Encoding competition, outperforming over 40 rival products.
The Canghai V2 chip architecture supports H.265 and H.266 encoding standards simultaneously, offering more than 10% and 30% compression improvements over V1 respectively.
Source: PANDAILY
