This paper proposes an efficient motion vector prediction (MVP) scheme for high speed motion estimation (ME) in H.264/AVC. Though MVP is essential for high coding efficiency, ME with MVP cannot be processed in parallel for high speed implementation due to the dependency of MVP. To eliminate this dependency, the proposed MVP uses the motion vectors in the neighboring macro blocks instead of those in the near sub-macro blocks which are used in the standard. Consequently, high speed ME is possible by using the proposed MVP and the processing time is reduced by up to 88% with insignificant coding quality degradation. The proposed MVP is verified with ME architecture which can encode SD (720×480) resolution video sequence in real-time at 54MHz operation clock with 284K logic gates.