Back when Intel launched its Sandy Bridge architecture, I identified Quick Sync as the design’s secret weapon. Developed quietly for five years, it caught both AMD and Nvidia completely off guard. I projected that it’d take a year for both competitors to respond. And they have—AMD with its Video Codec Engine and Nvidia with NVEnc.
Unfortunately, AMD’s solution is still missing in action four months after it was first promised. Encoding on a Radeon HD 7000-series card has to be achieved through programmable shaders, rather than more energy-efficient fixed-function logic sitting idle on the die.
NVEnc is up and running, and a GeForce GTX 680 manages to outperform Intel’s first-gen Quick Sync implementation.

Nvidia’s victory is short-lived, though. HD Graphics blows everything else out of the water—and that’s even after biasing MediaEspresso toward quality rather than performance.

Arcsoft’s MediaConverter supports Quick Sync just fine, but the latest build doesn’t behave as well under APP or CUDA/NVEnc. Although scaling isn’t as aggressive, we still see how HD Graphics 4000 slices into the time it takes to transcode a large video file into something better suited to a portable device.
How’d They Do It?
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Hong Jiang, Intel’s chief media architect, before last year’s Sandy Bridge introduction to get an in-depth look at how the company implemented Quick Sync. This year, he led a session at IDF discussing the improvements included with Ivy Bridge. The focus, he said, was squarely on performance. Faster processing gives developers more flexibility in implementing higher-quality filters. It also punches through workloads more quickly, returning the processor to idle and saving power.
An increase in EU count helps Intel’s performance story, as does the inclusion of dedicated graphics L3 cache and greater Media Sampler throughput. Because the Media Sampler is part of that scalable third domain referred to as Slice, Intel can add resources in future generations to ratchet 3D and media performance up even more.
The Multi-Format Codec Engine (MFX) carries over from Sandy Bridge, enabling hardware-based H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 decoding, along with H.264 encoding. Intel apparently reworked its context-adaptive variable-length encoding and context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding engines, though, which are both big mouthfuls referring to lossless encoding techniques that the MFX can decode faster.
Anticipating increasing demand for resolutions beyond 1080p in Ivy Bridge’s life cycle, Intel adds support to the MFX for 4096x4096 video decoding. In fact, Intel’s Jiang even claims the MFX can decode multiple 4K streams simultaneously.
Moving beyond Ivy Bridge’s decode capabilities, the media team also sought to improve the performance and quality of encoding tasks. A couple of paragraphs back I mentioned that the faster Media Sampler plays a part in Quick Sync’s speed-up. Specifically, it does the Motion Estimation stage’s heavy lifting, so greater throughput helps accelerate that step.
Now, Intel claims that its hardware-based encode solution achieves similar quality as a software solution. Last year, we wrote Video Transcoding Examined: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In-Depth and found that the quality of every hardware-based encode engine sacrificed some degree of quality compared to a pure software solution. Faced with three new accelerated transcode technologies, we really need to spend some time putting each under a microscope to analyze how that story may have changed.
- Ivy Bridge: Was It Worth The Wait?
- The Ivy Bridge Core: I Think I Know You
- HD Graphics 4000: The Plus In Intel’s Tick+
- HD Graphics 4000: Performance In 3DMark 11 And Batman
- HD Graphics 4000: Performance In Skyrim And WoW
- HD Graphics 4000: Native Compute Support
- Quick Sync: A Secret Weapon, Refined
- Platform Compatibility: Are Motherboard Vendors Ready?
- Overclocking Ivy Bridge: Core i7-3770K Is A Mixed Bag
- Ivy Bridge Memory Scaling
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012 SP3
- Benchmark Results: Adobe CS 5.5
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: File Compression
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Batman: Arkham City
- Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- How Much Faster Is Core i7-3770K Than -2700K And i5-2550K?
- An Evolution That Makes Sense, But Doesn't Impress




I have a few things on my mind.
1.) AMD - C'mon and get it together, you need to do better...
2.) imagine if Intel made an i7-2660K or something like the i5-2550K they have now.
3.) SB-E is not for gaming (too highly priced...) compared to i7 or i5 Sandy Bridge
4.) Ivy Bridge runs hot.......
5.) IB average 3.7% faster than i7 SB and only 16% over i5 SB = not worth it
6.) AMD - C'mon and get it together, you need to do better...
(moderator edit..)
Looking forward to the further information coming out this week on Ivy Bridge, as I was initially planning on buying Ivy Bridge, but now I might turn to Sandy Bridge-E
Temps as expected are high on the IB, but better than early ES which is very good.
Those with their SB or SB-E (K/X) should be feeling good about now
Now, time to read the review.
I really wish they would introduce a gaming platform between their stupidly overpriced x79esque server platform and the integrated graphics chips they are pushing mainstream. 50% more transistors should be 30% or so more performance or a much smaller chip, but gamers get nothing out of Ivy Bridge.
They're using their process to get to places they'll need to get to in the future
I have a few things on my mind.
1.) AMD - C'mon and get it together, you need to do better...
2.) imagine if Intel made an i7-2660K or something like the i5-2550K they have now.
3.) SB-E is not for gaming (too highly priced...) compared to i7 or i5 Sandy Bridge
4.) Ivy Bridge runs hot.......
5.) IB average 3.7% faster than i7 SB and only 16% over i5 SB = not worth it
6.) AMD - C'mon and get it together, you need to do better...
(moderator edit..)
To me it shows 2 main things. 1) that Ivy didn't improve on Sandy Bridge as much as Intel was hoping it would, and 2) just how far behind AMD actually is...
Yea yea I know most apps won't use 8 cores, but that's only because there was no 8 cores processors in past, not the other way around
I would have liked to see a bigger jump in performance. I'm still very satisfied with the i5 2500K system I built last year... This may actually be bad for Intel as they simply didn't innovate as much as I thought they would...
It's clear that while idling, there won't be much of a difference.
Too bad Tomshardware dropped the ball on that one.
Ivy bridge's prices are expected to be lower than the current SB prices, yes.
They have an expected pricing guide in the anandtech review.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review/2
I went with the 2500K too...but I kinda wish I'd gone with a 2700K...even if it is just for gaming. IB is beyond what I need right now...this month at least.
I was waiting reviews just to be sure.
don't regret yourself if you have a SB cpu!