Hikey970 - Codec

Inside Hikey970’s documentation, there is a Hi3670 built-in hardware encoder/decoder documentation. However, it is not clear to me what is the relation between them.
If I have the Hikey970 board, then I have support for built-in hardware for video encoding and decoding? If so, how can I guarantee during my implementation that I am using the hardware encoding instead of a software encoding? Besides that, where can I find the code driver/api?

Thanks in advance!