The rumours of an Intel SOC with AMD graphics were met with huge scepticism last year, with AMD finally giving Intel a run for its money with their launch of Ryzen. Mos figured Intel wouldn’t jump into bed with a company that intends to gobble up some of their market share. This of course turned out to be false, and it became clear that this was happening. Especially when Raja Koduri left AMD to work with Intel.
The main purpose of this combination is for Intel to be able to market their chips for thinner and lighter laptops that include decent level of graphics. Something their integrated stuff just never could never manage to offer.
There was nothing stopping manufacturers from combining an 8th gen Intel chip with any mobile GPU avaialble from either AMD or Nvidia, but Intel went a step further and embedded them together using Intel’s new EMIB (Embedded Multi-Die Interconnected Bridge) which does away for the need of an interposer,
Basically we have the Intel 8th Gen Mobile CPU, AMD’s Vega M GPU, and 4GB’s of HBM2 memory. All on a single chip; quite amazing to see. Fun fact, the Intel HD 630 integrated graphics is still apart of the chip. This makes the SoC a very attractive chip for manufactures, and will allow for some very thin and efficent devices with decent power.
The Intel chip will come in a few iterations from the i5-8305G @2.8GHz to 3.8GHz all the way up to a nice Core i7-8809G@3.1GHz to 4.2GHz. The AMD Vega M GPU will come in two flavors with GL and GH. The latter being aimed at small-desktop/HTPC like devices with clocks spends between 1,063MHz and 1,190MHz and 26 compute units. The former GL model has lower clock speeds at 931MHz and 1,011MHz and has 20 compute units, this is more aimed at laptop devices and is more power efficient.
The new chip will of course be in a slew of new devices in the coming months, including some announced at CES 2018, along with the new Intel ‘Hades Canyon’ NUC which utilises the very chip
