Skylake 4K to Kabylake 4k - comparison - more power or more efficiency?

[TheDarkKnight]

I've been considering the purchase of an Intel NUC and I'm making sure I understand the differences between Skylake capabilities and Kabylake capabilities. One area of interest to me is the H.265 improvements in Kabylake over Skylake.

If I understand things correctly, Skylake can do 4k at 30fps while Kabylake can do 4k at 60fps. But the improvement in Kabylake's 4k decoding is based solely upon adopting the HEVC Main-10 profile. Is that a correct statement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Tiers_and_levels

The wikipedia page above shows the Mbits/sec increasing by a factor of 4 simply because of the Main 10 profile upgrade?

The HD Intel Graphics from generation six to generation seven seem to be very similar in terms of how many GFLOPS they are capable of (for example the HD 520 and HD 620 Graphics)

Is the Main 10 profile capabilities something that could be given in a firmware update? Or is the Kabylake NUC (i.e., the CPU's inside) using hardware improvements to push those higher resolutions to 4x what is possible on Skylake NUC(CPUs)?

 

[you2]

I suspect it takes specific software to enable the hardware decoding. I.,e linux users aren't going to see the benefit for a long time. It isn't as simple as encoding the video in a specific format.

 

[TheELF]

Kaby supports 265 en/decode so it's pretty sure to be a new hardware en/decode block.

 

[giantpandaman2]

Correct me if I'm wrong here (I haven't really been paying attention) but isn't Kabylake or newer required for some 4k DRM?

 

[you2]

No. What Kabylake provides is hardware support for decoding 4K (h.265 to be specific; as 4K can be encoded many different ways); so it uses less energy (and for portables) battery life can last a lot longer. It has nothing do with DRM.

 

[UNCjigga]

Don't mean to thread hijack, but I bought the Intel NUC6CAYS for this express purpose. This is an Arches Canyon NUC with Apollo Lake (Celeron J3455) with HW HEVC and VP9 decoding.

Unfortunately, I'm having trouble playing 4K HDR content. The Movies & TV app within Win10 Creator's Update seems to play HDR10 video beautifully...unfortunately the audio drops out of sync. I don't have that problem with MPC-HC or VLC player, but the colors seem washed out in that app no matter what I do to adjust colorspace. If anyone else has a similar setup, would love to know your MPC-HC/VLC/Kodi config.

 

[arthur75]

Skylake can do 4k at 60 Hz fine, at least on macOS (currently running my skylake MBP on a 4k display at 60) , or is 60fps different from Hz ?
By the way I'm also thinking of buying a kabylake NUC, hesitating between i5 and i7, would be to do some 3d desging (Rhino 3d) and a bit of video editing (no games at all).
The i5 would be fine right ? (not so much about the price, but I'm afraid of fan noise with the i7)