In a surprising twist, Intel’s future 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPU architecture will completely separate the video playback and encoding functions from the integrated graphics, splitting them into new areas called SMUs or Standalone Media Units on the CPU. reported. Reported by Phoronix. This is an important change by Intel that allows media functionality to always be available even when the integrated graphics chip is disabled.
In a real-world scenario, when Meteor Lake launches, users building gaming PCs or content creation machines on future platforms will get all of Intel’s high-quality video decoding engines and Intel Access to QuickSync technology. Discrete graphics card. Free up memory and power resources and shift them entirely to the CPU. Things get even better if you have an older discrete GPU installed that lacks modern hardware accelerated codecs such as AV1 or H265 encoding.
Another perk of this transition is related to Intel’s F-series processors, which have no integrated graphics at all. The F-series Meteor Lake processors should theoretically be able to access all of Intel’s media features (including QuickSync) even if iGP is permanently disabled at the silicon level. Intel server CPUs and potential HEDT chips could also benefit from this change. This is because Intel has completely disabled integrated graphics chips from these CPU lineups.
Phoronix confirmed this change based on Meteor Lake’s new Linux enablement work, which includes patch notes detailing the SMU changes. These changes include new architectural changes to the graphics unit as Intel moves to the Arc Alchemist GPU architecture. As a result, we expect more advanced features like AV1 encoding to move to consumer-based Meteor Lake chips.
Unfortunately, Meteor Lake is still at least a year or two away from release, so we won’t be seeing these new changes for a while. Intel is currently busy preparing its upcoming 13th Gen Raptor Lake lineup for release. But thanks to early Linux development work on Meteor Lake, we can see some exciting hardware changes in future CPU architectures before release.
