Chipzilla has confirmed that its Sandy Bridge processor will pack media acceleration circuitry to speed up media. Intel had hinted at the concept earlier this month, but has now gone on record to confirm it. Sandy Bridge will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1.

According to Cnet, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel, confirmed that the Sandy Bridge processor--to be announced January 5--will pack media acceleration circuitry.

Smith said that Sandy Bridge will have cool dedicated circuitry for media acceleration. "All of us in our daily use, whether it's home videos or photos tend to pull things from the Internet, pull things from our own capture devices at home, bring them on to our PC, transform them into different formats...all of that will be dramatically faster if one utilizes this hardware acceleration, media acceleration that we have on Sandy Bridge," he said. He added that Sandy Bridge should enable slimmer designs that perform more like mainstream laptops.

Intel is on track to deliver the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge, which will be Sandy Bridge's successor, by the end of 2011. Intel has invested eight billion dollars to equip up to four factories for 22-nanometer production.

It looks like Ivy Bridge will be a shrink of Sandy Bridge with some enhancements. He also claimed that Intel will be getting to 8 nanometer chips by 2017.