Intel Meteor Lake to introduce “standalone media” block to handle video playback

Intel is planning some big changes to chip design for Meteor Lake. These new CPUs will move to a tile-based architecture, and new reports indicate that these chips will also feature a ‘standalone media' block for media encoding/decoding without a GPU. 

Traditionally, the iGPU of an Intel processor packs a media engine responsible for handling media encoding/decoding, but it seems Meteor Lake will be changing that. Instead, the upcoming architecture will use a new block exclusively for that purpose.

After poking around the Meteor Lake graphics driver for Linux, Phoronix found that the upcoming architecture will feature a second GT (Graphics Technology) block at the hardware level. Intel engineers describe it as a “standalone media” unit with its own “GuC (graphics micro controller), power management/force wake, etc”, using the same MMIO offsets as the primary GT block. In the description, Intel also compares the newly added block to the remote tiles on platforms like Xe HP Software Development Vehicle and Ponte Vecchio, stating they have many similarities.

It's unclear if the “standalone media” unit will be exclusive to chips without integrated graphics or a core feature for all Meteor Lake CPUs.

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KitGuru says: With a standalone media unit handling video decode/encode, GPUs will have more free resources for other workloads, increasing the system's multitasking capabilities.

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