Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's hardware video encoding and decoding technology, which is integrated into some Intel CPUs. The name "Quick Sync" refers to the use case of quickly transcoding ("syncing") a video from, for example, a DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 or Blu-ray Disk to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone

Smartphone

A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...

. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011.

Quick sync has been praised for being very fast. A benchmark from Tom's Hardware showed that it could encode a 449MB 4 minute 1080i file to 1024x768 (iPad resolution) in 22 seconds. The same encoding using only software took 172 seconds. The same encoding took 83 or 86 seconds GPU-assisted, using a Nvidia GeForce

GeForce

GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units designed by Nvidia. , there have been eleven iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for use on add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market...

 GTX 570 and a AMD Radeon HD 6870 respectively, both of which are contemporary high end GPUs. Unlike video encoding and decoding on a general-purpose GPU, such as an AMD Radeon

Radeon

Radeon is a brand of graphics processing units and random access memory produced by Advanced Micro Devices , first launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006. Radeon is the successor to the Rage line. There are four different groups, which can be differentiated by...

, Quick Sync is an application-specific integrated circuit

Application-specific integrated circuit

An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed solely to run a cell phone is an ASIC...

. This allows for faster and more power efficient video processing.

Quick Sync is built into some Sandy Bridge

Sandy Bridge

Sandy Bridge is the codename for a microarchitecture developed by Intel beginning in 2005 for central processing units in computers to replace the Nehalem microarchitecture...

 CPUs, but for example not on some low-end Sandy Bridge Pentiums. The current generation of Quick Sync supports the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...

, VC-1

VC-1

VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...

 and MPEG-2

MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

 video standards. The forthcoming Ivy Bridge

Ivy Bridge

Ivy Bridge may refer to:* Ivybridge, a town in Devon, England, a bridge there, and a painting of said bridge* Ivy Bridge , the codename for a processor microarchitecture that is being developed by Intel as the 22 nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge* Tiffin University, which includes Ivy Bridge College...

 CPU will include a "next generation" implementation of Quick Sync. Quick Sync was first unveiled at Intel Developer Forum 2010 (13 September), but according to Tom's Hardware Quick Sync had been conceptualized 5 years before that.

The older Clarkdale

Clarkdale (microprocessor)

Clarkdale is the code name for an Intel processor, initially sold as desktop Intel Core i5 and Core i3 and Pentium. It is closely related to themobile Arrandale processor; both use dual-core dies based on the 32 nm...

 CPUs had hardware video decoding support, but no hardware encoding support.

Linux

Quick Sync is not currently supported on Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, though support is being considered by Intel.

External links

• Intel® Quick Sync Video - intel.com