Sure, you can get a meaty recent-gen Intel processor and get Quick Sync and plenty of cores, it just gives you awkward dependencies - you then a) can't get a non-Intel-based system without losing Quick Sync even if they're better value/performance/performance-per-watt and b) you can't upgrade your transcoding CPU without doing a whole new build of your meaty system, which is high-cost if you've got an especially meaty system.

(You might want to upgrade your transcoding box to a newer generation processor that supports, say, AV1 encoding.)

And FWIW my Ryzen Embedded system isn't especially low-power by design, it was just the most accessible way of getting ECC memory for me.

It decodes and encodes video streams with very low power draw and CPU load, so you can transcode media in realtime if your player device doesn't support the media format in question or you have bandwidth limits out-of-home.

Can do the same with various GPUs, but Quick Sync tends to be the lowest-power and most well-supported at the software level.