Not really! Sandy Bridge was barely any improvement at video encoding over Nehalem, clock for clock (the first i7): http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-san

Not really! Sandy Bridge was barely any improvement at video encoding over Nehalem, clock for clock (the first i7): http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/16 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-i... And Ivy Bridge is at most 10%: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5626/ivy-bridge-preview-core-i7-3770k/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5626/ivy-bridge-preview-core-i... GPUs are much faster, and we have things like Quick Sync. And of course FPGA densities are skyrocketing still. But the integrated memory controller and hyperthreading of Nehalem was the last big jump in software encoding. Until 8 core goes mainstream, that's unlikely to change much. (Note that you can buy 6 core Sandy Bridge E workstations, but you could do that with Westmere on 1366, too)