here's something that surprised the hell out of me:

http://s7.directupload.net/images/131204/2x3qbaav.png

about a month ago, over at the intel developer forums, someone asked if intel planned to add support for hevc to quick sync and the answer that was given was that it would be a while before support was added to the ipp encoder and certainly not in the next version.

well it seems either the intel employee who answered that question was out of the loop or was avoiding revealing any confidential info.

according to the official intel slides the ipp encoder, which is part of the intel sdk, will support decode of mp3, encode/decode of aac (presumably these two are in hardware) and most importantly hevc encode/decode, albeit only in software at first.

but, before intel incorporates an ipp feature in hardware it first adds support if the software powered version so we may be less than a year from seeing intel cpu's that support hardware hevc encode/decode.

one has to wonder if this development is in response to amd announcing that future apu's will have hardware hevc encode capabilities.