Media Engine

The Media Engine is a marketing name for a group of specialized cores within Apple Silicon that are dedicated to the processing of codecs used for digital media.

History
Introduced in November 2020, the first Apple M1 chip included support for encoding and decoding of digital media at low power and high efficiency. In October 2021, the Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max introduced an upgraded version of this feature, which was the first to be marketed as the "Media Engine" and added support for ProRes acceleration, with the M1 Max featuring twice the throughput of the M1 Pro.

In March 2022, the Apple M1 Ultra again doubled the capacity with its implementation of the Media Engine which could handle up to 18 simultaneous streams 8K ProRes 422 video. Transcoding performance of the M1 Ultra was described as being up to 5.6 times faster than a 28-core 3rd-generation Mac Pro with an Apple Afterburner Card.