Intel Haswell CPUs Could Feature 4K Video Hardware Acceleration Support

With the introduction of Haswell in 2013, Intel reportedly wants to take the video decoding capabilities of its integrated GPUs one step further by adding hardware decoding support for 4K content, as well as a series of new post-processing features.

As VR-Zone reports, the integrated graphics core found inside Haswell is expected to include full MVC and SVC hardware encode and decode, as well as much faster AVC processing.

Both of these features are required for accelerating 4K video playback, which should become a major selling point for Intel’s processors, since this type of content will become increasingly popular in the next few years.

JPEG and MPEG hardware decode, with support for 16Kx16K still images, will also be included, while the MJPEG processing support should help with converting the video captured by Webcams.

The advanced video decoding features of the Haswell processors will also be joined by a series of special hardware accelerated effects, such as image stabilization, colour gamut mapping and frame rate conversion in hardware for different display options.

Noise reduction, de-interlacing, video sharpening and skin tone correction are also expected to come as standard features for Haswell CPUs.

It goes without saying that all these new hardware video decoding and post-processing capabilities found inside Haswell will come as a great benefit for notebooks and Ultrabooks.

Haswell is the code name used by Intel for Ivy Bridge's successor and this is expected to be launched in 2013.

Compared to their predecessors, the chips will feature higher IPC performance, support for the AVX2 instruction set, and will also receive DirectX 11.1 support.

Ultra-low voltage (ULV) mobile processors will feature a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design, enabling them to have a TDP of just 15 Watts, while desktop Haswell processor will utilize the new LGA 1150 packaging and socket.

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