Intel Teams Up With AMD for New 8th-Generation Processors With AMD GPUs

[wizard]

Cool! This should lead to some interesting Mac Book Pros. The interesting question here is how many variants are planed. For example will there be a 16 GB HBM variant and is this HBM memory shared between the GPU and the CPU? I pose these questions because it would be huge win for Apples designs if they got rid of the external RAM space completely. If people think this is strange it will happen sooner or later in laptop computers, if for nothing else it results in a faster RAM subsystem for the CPU/GPU.

The fact that this is happening has me wondering how much of a factor AMD was or is in the A11 GPU. It is well known that Apple hired many AMD engineers back when the company was having huge problems a few years ago, given this revelation it is possible that the A11 GPU is a AMD/Apple partnership of some sort. In any event if there is one thing that leaves a person frustrated with Apple is their secrecy especially with respect to the their processors.

 

[Count Blah]

As long as Apple can get one with 512Megs of Video Ram, you might see it in a Mac Mini, in the next couple of years.

Oh wait, this is a 45w CPU, that's WAY too much power for a Mac Mini.

 

[udayan81]

Dang it, just missed the stock opportunity there.

 

[mozumder]

So, how long until new MacBook Pros with these?

Or is this targeted towards lower-end MacBooks?

 

[chucker23n1]

Cool! This should lead to some interesting Mac Book Pros. The interesting question here is how many variants are planed. For example will there be a 16 GB HBM variant and is this HBM memory shared between the GPU and the CPU?

For this initial release, it looks like the HBM is limited to the GPU and will be 4 GB.

(It's also still Kaby Lake, so no LPDDR4.)

 

[Zwhaler]

This is a 45W CPU. Desktops are a completely different matter.

True, hence the second sentence of my post.

 

[chucker23n1]

True, hence the second sentence of my post.

OK, but why integrate a beefy GPU into the CPU on a machine that has as much headroom as an iMac?

 

[pat500000]

Teamwork!!!! Mac pro!!!! Where are you mac pro!!!
[doublepost=1510004987][/doublepost]

...dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Meow-woof

 

[djlythium]

I love seeing advances like this!

 

[N3ILA]

Intel Confirms Kaby-Lake G Series With Integrated Discrete Radeon GPUs – Here Are The First Benchmarks & Leaked Specifications

 

[FasterQuieter]

Put it in a Mac Mini. PLEASE!

 

[DanGoh]

If you can't beat em, team up.

My fear is a merger or buy out, which may lead to a period of little to no competition. I'm probably just worried about nothing tho.

 

[Dave245]

I wonder if these will end up in Apple laptops i.e the MacBook Pro 2018?

 

[WatchFromAfar]

Intel is doing this because they know what Apple is doing.

Don't be coy; what, prey tell, is Apple doing that affects Intel's decision to do this?

 

[chucker23n1]

Don't be coy; what, prey tell, is Apple doing that affects Intel's decision to do this?

Apple was probably one of the biggest customers of the Iris Pro (if not by far the biggest). With Iris Pro gone in Skylake and newer, it's quite plausible that these were created in part to create a successor for Apple.

 

[Feenician]

I wonder how hard it was for Intel to arrive at this solution.

 

[wizard]

It'd still be limited to four cores and 16 Gigs of RAM, mind you.

So? Lets face it for an entry level device even 8GB of RAM is good enough. 16 GB is in many ways overkill on an entry level machine. Given that I'm not convinced that this is targeted at entry level devices, frankly we need more info such a power levels.

Also people need to understand that this is a HMB (High Bandwidth Memory) subsystem and as such should be able to provide far better performance than any current APU offering simply because every APU design out there has its performance constrained by slow memory. It will be very interesting to see if systems can be delivered without any DRAM at all.

 

[fokmik]

plz tell me, this means we will have the cpu cores by intel and the iGPU made by amd ? or amd is an dGPU?

 

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

Intel is doing this because they know what Apple is doing.

Yes, this will crush whatever thought Apple had of Mac OS on ARM processors. There is no way Apple could compete with this combination, most definitely because of the discrete graphics of AMD. That has always been Intel's weak point. Not anymore. What could Apple do? Buy Nvidia?

 

[chucker23n1]

So? Lets face it for an entry level device even 8GB of RAM is good enough. 16 GB is in many ways overkill on an entry level machine.

These are Core-H processors, though — no entry-level machine has those in the first place. (I'm not sure why you seem to suggest a $2k MBP is now "entry-level"?)

Given that I'm not convinced that this is targeted at entry level devices,

It isn't. This is far too power-hungry for the 13-inch MBP, for example.

frankly we need more info such a power levels.

We have it. It's 45W.

It will be very interesting to see if systems can be delivered without any DRAM at all.

They can't. HBM is only used for the GPU.

 

[sublunar]

Sounds very much like a cheaper entry level model 15" MBP with 4 Kaby Lake cores coming in 2018 then.

It'd be really nice if they decided to put this into a Mac Mini but such a machine wouldn't be a Mini any more...

 

[fokmik]

i truly think Apple is behind this alliance...since Apple uses intel for CPU and amd for GPU !!

 

[chucker23n1]

plz tell me, this means we will have the cpu cores by intel and the iGPU made by amd ? or amd is an dGPU?

It's an AMD GPU core in the same package as an Intel CPU core, so "iGPU" is probably the fitting term.

Yes, this will crush whatever thought Apple had of Mac OS on ARM processors.

I don't see how. This is interesting for the 15-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core-H), but doesn't change that Apple A* CPUs compete quite well with the 12-inch MacBook and 13-inch MacBook Pro CPUs (Intel Core-Y and Core-U).

There is no way Apple could compete with this combination, most definitely because of the discrete graphics of AMD. That has always been Intel's weak point. Not anymore. What could Apple do? Buy Nvidia?

Most Macs don't need such powerful graphics.

 

[wizard]

Apple was probably one of the biggest customers of the Iris Pro (if not by far the biggest). With Iris Pro gone in Skylake and newer, it's quite plausible that these were created in part to create a successor for Apple.

This is a big possibility, Apple has been a direct influence on Intel with a number of unique SKU's coming to market due to Apples requests. Beyond that Intel has bee somewhat aggressive in doing custom, usually for Xeon hardware for high end users. This could simply be a volume custom solution for somebody with deep pockets (Apple). It will be interesting to see if the chip is widely available when it first start to ship or ships first in a Mac Book.

It does make one wonder why Iris Pro died. If Apple wasn't enough volume for the Iris solution it is hard to believe that this part will have the volume. Of course the R & D for the GPU core actually get spread a scores lots of implementations so that is a thing all to itself. In any event if combined with the Zen based APU's from AMD this chip could be a nice solution for Apple, Zen covers the very low power end while this guy is the chip for intro class performance machines.

 

[entropys]

This is for a 15 inch MBP without a discrete graphics chip. Price levels though will be maintained.