Intel's Haswell Architecture Analyzed: Building a New PC and a New Intel
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 5, 2012 2:45 AM ESTHaswell Media Engine: QuickSync the Third
Although we still have one more generation to go before QuickSync can apparently deliver close to x86 image quality, Haswell doesn't shy away from improving its media engine.
First and foremost is hardware support for the SVC (Scalable Video Coding) codec. The idea behind SVC is to take one high resolution bitstream from which lower quality versions can be derived. There are huge implications for SVC in applications that have varied bandwidth levels and/or decode capabilities.
Haswell also adds a hardware motion JPEG decoder, and MPEG2 hardware encoder.
Ivy Bridge will be getting 4K video playback support later this year, Haswell should obviously ship with it.
Finally there's a greater focus on image quality this generation, although as I mentioned before I'm not sure we'll see official support in a lot of the open source video codecs until Broadwell comes by. With added EUs we'll obviously see QuickSync performance improve, but I don't have data as to how much faster it'll be compared to Ivy Bridge.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
245 Comments
View All Comments
defiler99 - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
One of the best articles on Anandtech in some time. This is great original tech industry reporting.Gc - Saturday, January 12, 2013 - link
Congratulations, an intel cpu engineer wrote around 27 Dec 2012:"... Anandtech's latest Haswell preview is also excellent; missing some key puzzle pieces to complete the picture and answer some open questions or correct some details but otherwise great. ..."
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15iaet/iama_...
xaml - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This was first posted here a few handfuls of pages back as a comment by user "telephone". ^^yhselp - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
A few questions.Is there going to be a replacement (37W) for the current IVB 35W quad-core part? Quite a few designs are now dependable on this, lower power quad-core option - Sony S-series and Razer Blade, to name a few.
When can we expect all mobile CPUs (except maybe for the extreme series) to fall into the 10W-20W range? In three years' time and 10nm?
The decision to not include GT3 with desktop parts is very disappointing. A 35/45W low-voltage part with GT3 would make for an excellent HTPC build, among other things. Is there a chance Intel change their mind and start shipping GT3 desktop parts at some point?
JVimes - Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - link
Does EU stand for Execution Unit? That was surprisingly hard to google for.