Introducing the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives

Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) accelerates digital media, data processing, and communications applications. The primitives are a common interface for thousands of commonly used algorithms, future proofing your development by allowing the library code underneath to evolve with new processor improvements without changes in your application. Intel's hardware and compiler experts have provided high performance implementations of signal/image processing, computer vision, data compression, cryptography, string manipulation, audio processing, and video coding functions for several hardware/instruction set generations. As new instructions become available IPP is continually optimized, so code written with IPP will automatically take advantage of new CPU capabilities.

This can provide tremendous development and maintenance savings. Software developers can write programs with one optimized execution path, avoiding the alternative of multiple paths (SSE2, SSSE3, AVX, etc.) to achieve optimal performance across multiple generations of processors. The IPP implementations often have much better performance than is possible by simply compiling C code that is not specifically designed for the compiler and hardware. Intel develops optimizations for hardware platforms before they are available for general release, so they can be ready as soon as you deploy on new hardware. This can accelerate your development, allowing you to focus on new features instead of constantly revisiting low-level optimizations.

Intel® IPP provides a rich set of samples, including high-level multimedia application programming interfaces (APIs) as starting points for your development. These include audio, video, image, and speech codecs such as:

• Audio: AAC, AC3, MP3

• Video: H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC-1

• Image: JPEG, JPEG-2000

• Speech: GSM-AMR, G.723

In summary, the goal of the Intel® IPP software is to provide algorithmic building blocks for many types of applications with

• a simple "primitive" C interface and data structures to enhance usability and portability

• higher level APIs for more complex tasks like media processing, including related infrastructure around the performance critical operations supported by the primitives

• faster time-to-market

• primitives which evolve with Intel hardware

• Before You Begin Using Intel® IPP
  
• Finding the Higher Level Data Compression APIs
  
• Setting Up the Higher Level Media API Samples
  
• Finding the Intel® IPP Documentation