Intel Rolls Out Linux Media Driver for Tiger Lake, Jasper Lake, Elkhart Lake

Intel quietly released its quarterly Intel Media Driver update for Linux in December. Phoronix reported on Wednesday that the new driver brings GPU-accelerated encode and decode support for the company's Tiger Lake, Jasper Lake and Elkhart Lake processors, showing that they continue to be on track for a 2020 release.

Tiger Lake is the successor to Ice Lake that was launched during the holidays with Xe graphics. Both Jasper Lake and Elkhart Lake are based on the 10nm Atom Tremont architecture and Gen11 graphics and are rumored to replace Gemini Lake Refresh in the second half of 2020. 

As the documentation shows, Tiger Lake does not seem to get additional encode and decode capabilities. Phoronix sums up the other changes as follows:

“Additionally, there is support for building this driver with Clang 8, compressed surface creation support, various video processing enhancements, BRC visual quality improvements for encode, and various other encode/decode improvements.”