Wednesday, August 31st 2022
Intel Meteor Lake Can Play Videos Without a GPU, Thanks to the new Standalone Media Unit
Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake (MTL) processor is set to deliver a wide range of exciting solutions, with the first being the Intel 4 manufacturing node. However, today we have some interesting Linux kernel patches that indicate that Meteor Lake will have a dedicated "Standalone Media" Graphics Technology (GT) block to process video/audio. Moving encoding and decoding off GPU to a dedicated media engine will allow MTL to play back video without the GPU, and the GPU can be used as a parallel processing powerhouse. Features like Intel QuickSync will be built into this unit. What is interesting is that this unit will be made on a separate tile, which will be fused with the rest using tile-based manufacturing found in Ponte Vecchio (which has 47 tiles).
Sources:
Linux patches, via Phoronix
Intel Linux PatchesStarting with [Meteor Lake], media functionality has moved into a new, second GT at the hardware level. This new GT, referred to as "standalone media" in the spec, has its own GuC, power management/forcewake, etc. The general non-engine GT registers for standalone media start at 0x380000, but otherwise use the same MMIO offsets as the primary GT.
Standalone media has a lot of similarity to the remote tiles present on platforms like [Xe HP Software Development Vehicle] and [Ponte Vecchio], and our i915 [kernel graphics driver] implementation can share much of the general "multi GT" infrastructure between the two types of platforms.
32 Comments on Intel Meteor Lake Can Play Videos Without a GPU, Thanks to the new Standalone Media Unit
These media engines still use parts of main logic of GPU to do their thing though right? I'm sure they really wanted that but given how small AMD was at the time all they could afford to do was get the core CPU architecture and core layout done and out the door and every desktop and server Zen CPU pretty much still follows the same basic layout. They probably could have gotten some soft of basic GPU built into the first IO die but moving to a chipplet approach was a big enough change at the time. Too soon for them to give up on a dedicated GPU and there is no way a company the size of Intel wants to be beholden to anyone else for something so critical.
www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-Intel-Core-i9-12900KS-Performance-2314/
"However, for the H.264 and HEVC tests, Intel can be 2-3x faster than AMD. This definitely means that our benchmark favors Intel CPUs with Quick Sync"
As they state, Intel Quick sync is only faster with certain settings in Adobe premier mostly against hardware where the workload isn't being accelerated. That's only considering Adobe premier and they specifically state that performance of Quick Sync compared to NVENC is less than impressive in other applications.
Overall, NVEC is 100% better. Please try to cherry pick harder.
My dated understanding was based on decade-old Quicksync which was basically as you described - quick and dirty with huge filesizes and generally worse quality than AMD or Nvidia at any given bitrate. All it had back then was speed, and only in a limited range of codecs/fixed resolutions.
But atm, weither it's from puget, or youtube channel talking about video editing they all said that 12th gen quicksync is good. One guy even tested resolve and look at the scores. That doesn't scream "dogshit to me". (resolve allow you to choose wich media engine you want to use)
www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-GPU-Decoding-for-H-264-and-HEVC-media---is-it-faster-1908/