Inside the Intel Ivy Bridge Microarchitecture

The 2D Graphics Engine

The “2D” or “media” part of the graphics engine is in charge of not only generating the image you see while running regular programs such as word processors and web browsers, but it is also able to encode and decode video. This way, instead of using the CPU to run instructions for video encoding and decoding, these tasks are handled by the graphics engine, a process that improves performance and image quality.

The decoding engine used in the Ivy Bridge is called MFX or Multi-Format Codec Engine, and supports the AVC, VC1, and MPEG2 formats. (The first two are used by Blu-Ray discs, while the third one is used by DVDs.) As mentioned, this engine is not only capable of decoding 4K videos (4096 x 2304), but videos up to 4096 x 4096.

Figure 8: The MFX

For video encoding, Ivy Bridge uses a two-stage encoder. The first stage, called “ENC,” runs by software in the graphics engine processing cores (also called “EU,” Execution Units), while the second stage, called “PAK,” runs by hardware in the MFX pipeline. In Figure 9, you can see each part of the video encoding process that runs at each stage.

Figure 9: Video encoding

In Figure 10, you can see the video enhancement features supported by the Ivy Bridge video engine.

Figure 10: Video enhancement features