Intel Drivers Bring Quick Sync Video to Pentium, Celeron
Intel announced this week that it has added support for Intel Quick Video on select Pentium and Celeron processors in the Haswell family. This support can be found in the latest graphics driver available right here for 32-bit and right here for 64-bit.
"This driver upgrade delivers enhanced quality for video conferencing and video capturing usages with improvements in Intel Quick Sync Video Technology. This release provides a performance boost for OpenGL based games and applications delivering improved game playability," reads the company's blog.
Intel Quick Sync Video is the company's hardware video encoding and decoding technology. The company boasts that this feature can make video creation and conversion faster and easier, and is already integrated into some of Intel's CPUs. Users can create Blu-ray and DVD discs, convert 2D video files into 3D, and more.
"The 4th generation Intel Core processor allows you to optimize a video for a social media site 17 times faster with a new Ultrabook with a 4th generation Intel Core i5 4200U processor with Iris graphics versus a four year old notebook with an Intel Core2 Duo processor," the product page states.
In addition to adding Intel Quick Sync Video support, the drivers also fix a number of issues in Windows 8.1, one of which was an error that popped up while running the Cinebench benchmark application. The drivers also resolve an issue with the MMOG Second Life, and resolve an issue of image freeze when changing display configurations with a display connected using Miracast.
"While playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II, resolved issue where sometimes display corruption was seen when changing from game scene or exiting the game," reads one issue.
"Resolved issue where after having connected three DisplayPort monitors to the system in daisy chain mode, sometimes the resolution changes are not applied successfully," reads another addressed issue.
The release notes are here (pdf). However, here are all the Intel processors that will receive support for Intel Quick Video:
- 4th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200
- 4th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel Iris Graphics 5100
- 4th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 5000/4600/4400/4200
- 3rd Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500
- Intel Pentium Processor 3558U/3561Y/G3220/G3220T/G3320TE/G3420/G3420T/G3430 with Intel HD Graphics
- Intel Celeron Processor 2957U/2961Y/2981U/G1820/G1820T/G1820TE/G1830 with Intel HD Graphics
In case you weren't aware of it: it's called "i7".
Might as well ask Microsoft to add all features of Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Basic.
Back in the P4 days when Intel introduce HT, adding HT to a core added less than 5% die area and power and Intel used the same dies for both HT and non-HT parts. Back in the P4 days, parts of the pipeline were duplicated for each thread (more so in Prescott) but IIRC, Intel scrapped most of that duplication in favor of dynamic sharing when they resurrected HT in the i3/5/7 so the die area and power cost should be even lower than the original implementation.
AFAIK, Intel does not manufacture separate dies for i5 and i7 - at least I could not find mentions of different die sizes between 4C CPUs from the same generation using the same IGP. They simply fuse HT and 2MB of cache off.
The L3 cache banks are far more likely than HT circuitry to get a non-fatal defect hit. If a defect hits HT circuitry, it has a high probability of screwing up the whole core due to messing up decoding, scheduling, resource reservation and other parts of the pipeline that have to keep tabs on threads.
However, the bulk of i5 are likely perfectly good i7/Xeon1P cores that get castrated to meet SKU demand for lower-end parts.
I believe you are right, and I confess I have no idea how Intel goes about their production scaling nowadays. It would make sense that they simply "nerf" the parcel of their production that needs to be sold as lower-end products.
This does not, on the other hand, invalidate the fact that no software patch from Intel is going to enable those resources, as the previous commenter suggested.
You make it sound like I tried to disprove that when I was merely clarifying what was most likely to cause chips to get binned down due to defects and adding that most chips that get features fused off to fill orders were likely perfectly fine.