According to DS which posted something about it on doom9+1, that "engine" is similar to an already existing Broadcom encoder chip and Intel may just have licensed it from them and included it in their chips - if this is the case it's nothing really innovative.
The actual performance would also be barely enough to encode an 1080p in real time (40-50fps) , using some relatively poor quality settings ... x264 is already much better optimized and gives much more speed on better quality compared to than this "engine".
Just see this quote:
Quote:
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The video encode engine is a brand new addition to Sandy Bridge. Intel is being light on the details of the encoder but we saw a demo where Intel took a ~3 minute 1080p 30Mbps source video and transcoded it to a 640 x 360 iPhone video format. The total process took 14 seconds and completed at a rate of roughly 400 frames per second.
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Run a similar test with x264 and see how fast you can encode the clip using preset --fast or --veryfast.. Encoding something to 640x480 (though personally I really think it was 480x360 as video was for iPod/iPhone but whatever) is not hard.