In 2011, Teradici announced the Teradici APEX 2800 offload card. The APEX card is a PCIe card that is used to offload the PCoIP protocol that is encoding from the physical server's CPU (abstracted as vCPU within the vDesktop) to the offload card. The PCoIP Hardware Accelerator reduces CPU overhead by offloading the 100 most active virtual displays to ensure its capabilities are used where most needed. This could increase server consolidation ratios by up to two times. The Hardware Accelerator in the Horizon View environment enhances and complements either shared GPU or GPU pass-through deployments. Combined with certain PCoIP zero clients, the accelerator doubles the frame rates to ensure a consistent user experience.

This offloading is for videos only and does not help offload the audio channels of PCoIP. The APEX offload card is an integrated solution with VMware View.

As mentioned earlier in this book, the fact that VMware View is capable of leveraging hardware...