CPU comparison for high quality HEVC encoding?

[qb_master]

Hello,

I'm currently considering upgrading my CPU (well, my PC in general), and one of the drivers towards this is the fact that my 3rd gen Core i7-3770 (~2012) has no hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding. It is SLOW at this task. As such, I'm trying to find info about what CPUs are the best at HEVC encoding, and video encoding in general.

(I'm shying away from GPUs in this case because, while many GPUs support HEVC encoding, even real-time, their quality/compression factor seems to be considerably less than that of a CPU-encoded video file. While this is fine for many live game streamers, it's not so great for archiving purposes where the greatest quality per bitrate is desired.)

I see that Intel CPUs have implemented hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding since Skylake (~2015), and continue to support it today in all their CPUs (and in their ARC GPUs). I can't seem to find any information about what AMD CPUs support HEVC encoding. However, I've seen in some (outdated) charts that some AMD processors do seem to hold their own in HEVC encoding tasks - though this may be simply by the sheer speed of the CPU itself.

* What would be the absolute fastest CPU currently for HEVC encoding?
* What CPUs prove quite good at this task at a value, and how much of a tradeoff is there compared to the best?
* Does Intel vs AMD matter here? Am I just missing AMD's support, or do they not have hardware-accelerated encoding on their CPUs?
* Should I focus much on whether there is dedicated hardware acceleration, or would the raw number of cores/speed of the CPU be more important here?
* Is there somewhere that we can find good benchmarks on this particular measure? Ideally with a sample video file that is downloadable, and has been used to test various CPUs for their encoding efficiency?

Any push in the right direction would be appreciated

[exekutive]

Any powerful CPU.
Even though most modern CPUs have hw h265 encoding, software encoding is usually superior anyway (unless you only want speed at the cost of everything else ie size, quality)