Those of you in the software development industry and looking at Ultrabooks and Windows 8 need to be aware of two updated SDKs. Intel’s Media SDK has reached 2012 R3 status and the SDK for OpenCL Applications has reached 2013 Beta.

Both SDKs are important because they allow software developers to access video and OpenCL-specific hardware in the HD4000 GPU; Part of the Ivy Bridge platform for Ultrabooks. We’ve already seen how important the Media SDK is in video editing on an Ultrabook and rendering and the new OpenCL SDK should bring better graphics performance to your browser. The new updates allow the SDK to use the new Intel HD Driver for Windows 8.

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With the release on Intel’s latest generation of processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, comes Quick Sync Video 2.0. This is an enhancement to Intel’s original Quick Sync Video technology which provides hardware encoding and decoding of video directly on the processor. All second-generation Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks feature Quick Sync 2.0 which is up to twice as fast as Quick Sync found in first-generation Sandy Bridge Ultrabooks. In order to take advantage of Quick Sync 2.0 you need to be using software that is designed to use it; a number of companies have announce support for the technology.

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A lot has been said about Ivy Bridge, the 3rd generation Intel Core compute platform and the platform that will go into the 2nd Generation of Ultrabooks. Although the CPU core remains largely the same as in the ‘Sandy Bridge’ platform, it’s going to be manufactured with the next generation process at 22nm. That means lower power usage and more space for other goodness on the die and that’s exactly what Intel have done. They’ve taken the opportunity to vastly improve the graphics and media subsystem. You’ll hear about ‘70%’ improvements on the GPU which relates to gaming graphics. Early tests have shown that where modern game frame-rates were in the 10-20fps range, they may now reach above the all-important 30fps figure and include DirectX11 support which brings the Ultrabook right into mainstream gaming. In this article though I want to talk about the other features on the GPU that relate to media. For many people they may be more important than 3D gaming frame rates.

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As someone that is looking for a comfortable and mobile 720p video editing solution, the Intel Quick-Sync Video component is one of the most exciting for me. It contains both decode and encoding hardware that can really help when converting or rendering a video. Although the demo you see below was done on a Samsung Series 9, it’s using the same 2nd-Generation Core platfom as Ultrabooks will.

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