First Intel Processor with AMD Radeon Graphics Within 2017

[TheGuruStud]

Yeah, you just illustrated the lack of complete monopoly in thd ISP field by listing multiple contenders... not sure what your point was in doing that.

They may have regional monopolies, which get ignored often. I REALLY doubt a complete monopoly would be ignored, which is what Intel would have if AMD croaked. Intel has NEVER been the sole producer of x86 chips and those "decades" you cite had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, AMD, the list goes on...

You think that collusion and regional monopolies aren't as damaging? It's all smoke and mirrors. You think they sued Google and municipalities out of the ISP biz for fun? They will not compete and the fed govt is in on it.

And if you think that Intel hasn't had an effective monopoly on x86 forever....idk what to say. They fooled you, though.

Giving the most crooked people and organizations (corps/US govt) on the planet the benefit of the doubt is dangerous and stupid.

 

[Kanan]

Good news, such collaboration is always nice and AMD needs the money anyway.

 

[R-T-B]

You think that collusion and regional monopolies aren't as damaging? It's all smoke and mirrors. You think they sued Google and municipalities out of the ISP biz for fun? They will not compete and the fed govt is in on it.

And if you think that Intel hasn't had an effective monopoly on x86 forever....idk what to say. They fooled you, though.

Giving the most crooked people and organizations (corps/US govt) on the planet the benefit of the doubt is dangerous and stupid.

I'm not an idiot, of course I know all these monopolies are damaging, and no I'm not fooled. It doesn't change the basic fact that a complete monopoly without even pretend competition to go around will not be ignored by even the most braindead of regulators. Hence, Intel needs AMD.

 

[renz496]

Good news, such collaboration is always nice and AMD needs the money anyway.

this is not "news" but rumor. people think this is good for AMD but what kyle is suggesting is something different entirely. if you have been following this story since the beginning then you will understand that in the long run this is bad for AMD. the original story is intel did not simply want to license the tech from AMD but they want RTG for themselves. and Raja was suppose to be intel "inside person" to make that happen. he even mentioned that intel already lay off massive people from their GPU division to be replace entirely by RTG.

 

[blobster21]

Must be one hell of a heater @ 100% use

 

[john_]

I'm struggling with the business sense of this. If Ryzen is a competent chip it will erode Intel's market share, slowly admittedly. Why invest in your only competitor who may have something good going on?

Unless it's a simple case of Intel throwing money at AMD so it can concentrate more on CPU design and stop wasting R&D on iGPU.

Hmm.... Need more info before chin rubbing starts.

IF, and this is a huge IF, this is true, I guess the logic behind this goes like this.

AMD has 10% of the market. Even if Ryzen was much faster than Kaby Lake, and it isn't, Intel's influence and brand recognition would be enough to keep Ryzen at one quarter of the market, best case scenario. We saw something like that 12 years ago with Athlon64 vs Pentium 4.

So, why fight to go from 10% to 25%, when you can get payed for the other 75%-90% of the market? OK maybe you will not go to that 25% and stay at 15%-20%, but the income from selling GPUs to Intel will be significant, probably much higher than what AMD will make from an extra 5%-10% of the midrange market where APUs will be playing ball.

Then there are other areas where AMD will gain. We already have seen AMD's gains from the consoles. It wasn't money, but the changes in game development.

The consoles where enough to change the game market. Nvidia tried with PhysX and GameWorks, but it couldn't stop the console ports tsunami. So, while games in the past where written for Nvidia hardware, something that was catastrophic for AMD, in driver's stability and performance, now they are written and optimized for GCN. The results can be seen this last year, with AMD cards not only continuing in gaining against Nvidia's cards in benchmarks, but also Nvidia having problems with it's driver's stability. Not to mention DX12 and Vulkan.

With Intel going GCN, GCN becomes like the x86 for graphics cards. Nvidia's next architecture should be a marvel of engineering for developers to not ignore it. Not to mention that FreeSync and other AMD techs will become the de facto standards over night.

Nvidia is a threat to both AMD and Intel. But mostly Intel, because Intel is the huge company here, Intel is the company that will lose the most. An alliance between AMD and Intel to throw out Nvidia of the desktop market, will benefit both tremendously. In the future the war between ARM and x86 platforms will only intensify and Nvidia can become a huge asset for the ARM camp, both in the gaming market and the AI market. If AMD and Intel manage to limit Nvidia's expansion, or even more, manage to turn Nvidia's fast growth to a recession, they will have better chances to defend against the ARM platform.

 

[mtcn77]

Intel has great success with MCM designs. If AMD could chime in to their ESRAM in exchange I say what a fantastic trade!

 

[Camm]

Incredibly doubtful, until I see an announced product, this strikes me as still being a licensing exercise, not a GPU one.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I'm with iO, i suspect it's for a new MacBook [Pro]

 

[eidairaman1]

speculation until a physical product is produced

 

[qubit]

Hiya @btarunr I wanted to look at that source forum, but your source link only points to the home page, unfortunately.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Well, Intel has been doing just that with their iGPU's since the beginning of time. They just counted all GPU's sold with iGPU as "our GPU" even if user actually use discrete graphic card.

Though, I don't understand the logic behind this move. Sure, it's a short term financial injection, but long term, they'll be eroding their own APU market. I mean, AMD's APU's have an edge because of Radeon core. Giving that to Intel and you're killing your only special thing about your CPU's. Because lets be honest, Intel GPU's, while they kinda get the framerate done, they are still garbage. I mean, it's 2017 and all they offer is Anisotropic filter ON or OFF. I've had up to 16x AF on like 5+ ? years old crappy E-450 APU. With 6x FSAA!

I very much doubt it's the latest IP if it happens.

 

[thesmokingman]

I'm struggling with the business sense of this. Why invest in your only competitor who may have something good going on?

As I understand it it's two fold. On one hand they absolutely need IP protection. Thus if they dropped Nvidia IP, they would be liable for future suits from Nvidia. I get the sense that their IGPU has not gotten them much gain for the tradeoffs, the massive licensing payments and the noose around their necks in regards to IP. That's probably why AMD looks attractive to them. If they have to pay another party, at least it is to the party that is not directly competing with them in a few key sectors not cpu or gpu focused. This goes to the second reason, Nvidia has been too successful as of late in professional segments, namely AI. Nvidia is beating Intel pretty soundly fwiw. Thus this marriage with AMD serves two purposes, IP protection with possible joint ventures and the second to stop funding Nvidia, their key rival in the AI space. Intel is at the end of their 1.5billion agreement over six years, so you can see why they want no more of that.

 

[Xajel]

It's logical to have it as MCM, the first reason is already mentioned as to not give Intel the secretive design - although such idea can be done with a hell of an agreement -

But second, If Intel want to make it in their own they will have to redesign it actually as the manufacturing process is different between these fabs, so they will have to redesign it to fit their process and also they will need to optimise it further as it's a completely new design to them. in this case the cost it self will be very high as it will add more time to fab it, and a lot of engineering work hours not just from Intel, but also from AMD.. Intel might as well disclose sensitive manufacturing secrets to AMD's engineer for such collaboration.

 

[CoD511]

I'm struggling with the business sense of this. If Ryzen is a competent chip it will erode Intel's market share, slowly admittedly. Why invest in your only competitor who may have something good going on?

Unless it's a simple case of Intel throwing money at AMD so it can concentrate more on CPU design and stop wasting R&D on iGPU.

Hmm.... Need more info before chin rubbing starts.

Because AMD isn't nearly as much as a threat to Intel as Nvidia is in terms of their establishment of several new revenue streams in all massive growth segments. Intel sales were down last year, if I recall. The problem is, Nvidia isn't establishing themselves as a chip manufactuer but has established themselves over the years as a platform company; I'd wish Intel good luck with competition in active market segments that threaten their revenue stream if they weren't so damn anti-competitive.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Isn't Intel licensing a lot of GPU stuff from NVIDIA that is soon expiring? Is it not true that once those licenses are gone, Intel can't put a GPU of any kind on their chips without infringing on NVIDIA and AMD patents? I wouldn't be surprised if all Intel processors past Kaby Lake have an AMD GPU because of that. AMD likely wouldn't agree to license their technology but they're happy selling them GPUs they can MCM. Intel saves money by increasing yields (less die space) and being able to fire/retask their GPU designers. The marriage really does make sense when you consider the licensing aspects of it.

Edit: Yup, NVIDIA/Intel licensing agreement ends March 31, 2017. Intel can keep producing GPUs perpetually, but they get nothing new from NVIDIA after that date. Intel GPUs are effectively no longer getting upgrades so in models where they want good graphics, they're just buying AMD chips.

That article was written in 2015 and at the time, 30% of NVIDIA's profit came from this Intel licensing deal. I think Intel sees what NVIDIA is doing and don't like funding them anymore. Buy chips in bulk from AMD as demand requires ends up being a lot cheaper anyway.

Additionally, it provides a buffer from an anti-trust lawsuit if Intel resumes shady tactics to keep Zen at bay. They can point to their balance sheet and say "we paid AMD $x million dollars for AMD GPUs!" A judge would have to take that into consideration when fining Intel.


TL;DR: This hurts NVIDIA hugely and helps AMD a little directly (big purchaser of chips) but a lot indirectly (this is going to put Radeon Settings on a lot of prebuilts which is going to give Radeon mindshare it desperately needs).

 

[cdawall]

Everyone knows this is all hearsay from Kyle Bennet on [H] with literally zero proof to back it up correctly?

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

This is one big joke. gottabee!

 

[GC_PaNzerFIN]

Not going to happen on consumer market. Might happen in a custom Apple SKU though, they are the only ones with enough leverage over both companies to make it happen.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Not going to happen on consumer market. Might happen in a custom Apple SKU though, they are the only ones with enough leverage over both companies to make it happen.

Interesting thought.
I just meant I don't know but that could work too

 

[dorsetknob]

Intel has NEVER been the sole producer of x86 chips and those "decades" you cite had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, AMD, the list goes on...

Even Nvidia made x86 chips in the past heck there is still a webpage on the nvidia servers mentioning this
dont believe me
google it or ask politely for a link

 

[Camm]

Even Nvidia made x86 chips in the past heck there is still a webpage on the nvidia servers mentioning this
dont believe me
google it or ask politely for a link

I'm pretty sure that was a ARM binary translator, not a native x86 chip. And that got quashed with the Nvidia-Intel patent case in 2009 when Nvidia was banned from making 'x86 emulators'.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Even Nvidia made x86 chips in the past heck there is still a webpage on the nvidia servers mentioning this
dont believe me
google it or ask politely for a link

NVIDIA has an x86 license they got through acquisitions a while back. I think they dabbled once in x86 and then quit when Intel agreed to the licensing deal back in 2011. Because of the apparent divorce of NVIDIA and Intel in 2017, it's possible NVIDIA could dust those plans off and work on it again.

 

[R-T-B]

I'm pretty sure that was a ARM binary translator, not a native x86 chip. And that got quashed with the Nvidia-Intel patent case in 2009 when Nvidia was banned from making 'x86 emulators'.

Your actually thinking of the Transmeta product.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I think the only way NVIDIA could be competitive in the x86 space is if they some how manage to contract Jim Keller to design it. He might flatly decline the offer because of the obvious conflict of interest with AMD.

Additionally, NVIDIA's revenue is going to fall from $5 billion to $3.5 billion. They have to tighten their belt so starting a new, costly R&D project in a highly competitive market isn't exactly going to excite investors.