Kabylake support in Intel Media products

[Mark_L_Intel1]

We’d like to answer developers questions regarding Kabylake support in Intel Media Products.

There is no Intel^® Xeon^® E3 v6 (Kabylake) support in the Intel^® Media Server Studio for Linux or Windows. Intel^® Media Server Studio is our product for data center and cloud developers https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-media-server-studio. 

The primary reasons we are not providing support for Intel^® Xeon^® E3-1200 v6 is because:

• Intel^® Xeon^® E3-1500 v5 (featuring Intel^® Iris™ Pro graphics) delivers better performance for intensive media or graphics workloads
• Intel^® Xeon^® E3-1200 v6 does not deliver significant visual quality improvements

Therefore, we recommend developers building graphics or media-intensive server applications stay with Intel^® Xeon^® E3 v5.

Intel^® Xeon^® E3-1200 v6 delivers the right mix of performance and capabilities for markets including entry workstation and entry server.

We continue development work for Intel^® Media Server Studio for improved performance and video quality

Developers targeting Windows and 7th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors for client and desktop applications can use the latest Intel® Media SDK for Windows: https://software.intel.com/en-us/media-sdk .

Another option for Linux developers is to leverage VA API from the Intel open source Linux drivers on 01.org: https://01.org/linuxgraphics.

We appreciate your feedback and are carefully considering your input for planning our upcoming software releases.  Please continue to share your feature requirements either via this forum or PM to Mark Liu.

[sytse_v_]

Does this mean that there will be no Kabylake support at all for the Linux platforms?

What about the other 7th generation products for desktop/mobile?

[Vishal_I_]

Can we use VA API on 7th generation cores for hardware accelerated encode/decode on Linux platform  ?

What would be best for encoding/decoding JPEG on 7th gen cores on Linux platform.

[Jeffrey_M_Intel1]

Sorry for the delayed reply.  As stated above, Media Server Studio is not moving support forward to Kabylake architecture (7th Generation Core, Intel^® Xeon^® E3-1200 v6).  This applies only to Media Server Studio.  Other Intel efforts such as VAAPI will continue to support new hardware generations as they are released. 

VAAPI is a fine choice for JPEG on Kabylake.  Some references (such as wiki.libav.org) may list MJPEG, which is a video format where each frame is a JPEG image.