Tuesday, October 8th 2019
The End of a Collaboration: Intel Announces Discontinuation of Kaby Lake-G with AMD Radeon Vega Graphics
The marriage of Intel and AMD IPs in the form of the Kaby Lake-G processors was met with both surprised grunts from the company and a sense of bewilderment at what could come next. Well, we now know what came next: Intel hiring several high-level AMD employees on the graphics space and putting together its own motley crew of discrete GPU developers, who should be putting out Intel's next-gen high-performance graphics accelerators sometime next year.
The Kaby Lake-G processors, however, showed promise, pairing both Intel's (at the time) IPC dominance and AMD's graphics IP performance and expertise on a single package by placing the two components in the same substrate and connecting them via a PCIe link. A new and succinct Intel notice on the Kaby Lake-G page sets a last order time (January 31, 2020, as the last date for orders, and July 31, 2020, as the date of last shipments), and explains that product market shifts have moved demand from Kaby Lake-G products "to other Intel products". Uptake was always slow on this particular collaboration - most of it, we'd guess, because of the chips' strange footprint arrangement for embedding in systems, which required custom solutions that had to be designed from scratch. And with Intel investing into their own high-performance graphics, it seems clear that there is just no need to flaunt their previous collaborations with other companies in this field. Farewell, Intel-AMD Kaby Lake-G. We barely knew you.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
The Kaby Lake-G processors, however, showed promise, pairing both Intel's (at the time) IPC dominance and AMD's graphics IP performance and expertise on a single package by placing the two components in the same substrate and connecting them via a PCIe link. A new and succinct Intel notice on the Kaby Lake-G page sets a last order time (January 31, 2020, as the last date for orders, and July 31, 2020, as the date of last shipments), and explains that product market shifts have moved demand from Kaby Lake-G products "to other Intel products". Uptake was always slow on this particular collaboration - most of it, we'd guess, because of the chips' strange footprint arrangement for embedding in systems, which required custom solutions that had to be designed from scratch. And with Intel investing into their own high-performance graphics, it seems clear that there is just no need to flaunt their previous collaborations with other companies in this field. Farewell, Intel-AMD Kaby Lake-G. We barely knew you.
14 Comments on The End of a Collaboration: Intel Announces Discontinuation of Kaby Lake-G with AMD Radeon Vega Graphics
o_O
This is the bridge that caused all of those RTG people move into Intel. This is the stamp that proves that these kind of technologies can make something amazing.
This, is pretty much that trigger that started Intel Graphics division.
If AMD could somehow, make a 4-6 CPU core APU with enough GPU horsepower to do 1080p ultra at 60fps (again, embedded 4gb of HBM2e would be essential) and keep the tdp down to approximately 140watts or less (i7-9750h - 45w + RTX 2060 - 90w = 135watts) it'd be a game changer.
Coming back to my 5775C remark... people replied- where's the market? They're probably right. I mean the A10 wasn't killing anything either. AMD would need some sort of campaign of 'Ultrabook' like proportions to get people accustomed to a new norm, form factor and function combo.
To "Why not a stronger 5775C?" Intel answers with "eDRAM is too expensive" and ill add that they can't make it over 128MB at the moment without being gigantic to a point where you better just use HBM2.
For NUC-like solutions, HBM2e has to be the ultimate solution for power to size ratio, but its painfully expensive to use. That's one of the reasons this NUC is so expensive.
You do get the performance of something like a GTX 1650, which is very nice. The question is - what is your target audience? Will you be aiming towards budget oriented gamers? No, That's why you have CPUs like 9100F \ Ryzen 3 of kinds and GPUs like Radeon RX 5500.
That narrows it to a very niche type of audience that want to have power in a very small form factor, smaller than even what MITX cases can offer. I'm not sure AMD \ Intel are truly after this market, and pretty sure Hades Canyon NUC so far has not been making billions for those both.
The natural curve of APUs will have to keep bending to available DDR speeds of standard platforms, as slow as they may be (and they are, cripplingly slow).