Intel Demos Meteor Lake iGPU 8K60 & SOC Tile E-Core Only 1080P Video Playback Capabilities

06.10.2023 - 02:37 / wccftech.com / Meteor Lake

In a new video, Intel has demoed the video playback capability of its Meteor Lake iGPU and its Low-Power E-Cores.

The Intel Meteor Lake, 1st Gen Core Ultra, CPUs are composed of various IPs and architectures. The tiled architecture incorporates a range of technologies and Intel is showcasing the advantages that it brings with its next-gen CPU architectures. For this purpose, Intel demoed video playback on the Meteor Lake iGPU and its low-power E-Cores and the results are super interesting.

See Meteor Lake video in action on Intel Core Ultra laptops with integrated Intel Arc graphics. We went all the way to Malaysia to watch the GPU enable smooth playback of high-bitrate 8K60 footage, a task that required workstation-class hardware just a few years ago. In another demo, Meteor Lake’s disaggregated architecture and focus on power efficiency enable 1080p playback with the CPU and GPU tiles turned off, leveraging low-power E-cores and video decoding built into the SoC tile.

via Intel

Starting with the Meteor Lake iGPU, the upgraded Alchemist architecture allows the graphics tile to achieve an 8K 60 FPS video playback in a very smooth fashion. The demo used a high bit-rate stream at 120 Mbps running on HEVC codec. According to Intel, just a few years ago, the same playback required workstation-class hardware but now, you will be able to get this level of video playback performance within a light form factor laptop.

Another useful aspect of the tiled architecture is that it houses two low-power E-Cores within the SOC tile and since the media engine is housed within the SOC tile, laptops with Meteor Lake can offload all video processing load to those E-Cores for high-efficiency video decoding &1080p play-back. You can technically have both the Compute Tile and Graphics Tile off which would save a lot of power and result in higher battery times on your laptop.

There are definitely cool use cases for the upcoming 1st Gen Core Ultra family. The Meteor Lake CPUs are expected to launch on the 14th of December so expect more information and demos in the coming months.