Intel and Radeon officially team up to create an innovative new mobile CPU/GPU

The tech world has been turned upside-down, Intel an AMD Radeon are working together to create a new product that combined an Intel CPU with a semi-custom AMD GPU to create a more compact CPU/GPU solution for notebooks than ever before. 

This situation is almost like cats and dogs forming an alliance, news that will sound so strange to the ears of many that it is almost unbelievable. The answer to why this has happened can be put down to one thing, Nvidia.

AMD wants an increased market share from their Radeon products and Intel wants to have greater access to the high-end of the mobile market, providing a strong CPU/GPU solution that will allow them to create a line of thin and light gaming notebooks that Nvidia cannot match. 

Intel’s new design decreases the amount of area required to create a powerful notebook with a powerful CPU/GPU, combining a custom-made AMD GPU, HBM2 memory and an Intel CPU onto a single-package, multi-chip solution to enable the creation of more powerful, thin and light notebooks than ever before. 

Thanks to a new Intel technology called EMIB (more info on EMIB can be found here), Intel and Radeon can fuse these chips into a single package without the need for a silicon interposer. Instead, Intel is using their Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge technology to provide the same high-bandwidth connectivity without the complexity of an interposer, making this new chip extremely easy to create while providing extremely fast interconnect speeds.    

We often talk about our focus on driving innovation for the enthusiast community, a targeted but growing segment of the PC market. This point is underscored by what we have been delivering with our Intel® Core™ X-series processors, Intel® Core™ H-series mobile processors and, more recently, the first of our 8th Gen Intel® Core™ desktop processors. Each product line offers a range of new capabilities, workloads and form factors to cater to the diverse needs of enthusiasts.

But as we looked at this lineup, we recognized an opportunity: thinner, lighter, more powerful enthusiast mobile platforms that deliver a premium experience. Currently, most enthusiast mobile PCs have Intel Core H-series processors plus higher-powered discrete graphics1, resulting in systems that average 26 mm in height. Compare this to thin and light laptops that are trending down to 16 mm or less, with some even as thin as 11 mm.

We wanted to find a way to improve this. A way to deliver a stronger combination of performance-level processors and discrete graphics that open the door to even smaller form factors. And, we knew we could do it by combining our Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology with a new power-sharing framework.

Today, we’re sharing initial details on a new product that does exactly that, reducing the usual silicon footprint to less than half that of standard discrete components on a motherboard. That’s more freedom for OEMs to be creative and deliver innovative thin and light designs with improved thermal dissipation. It also delivers space to add new features, create new board layouts, explore new cooling solutions or increase battery life.

The new product, which will be part of our 8th Gen Intel Core family, brings together our high-performing Intel Core H-series processor, second generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) and a custom-to-Intel third-party discrete graphics chip from AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group* – all in a single processor package.

It’s a prime example of hardware and software innovations intersecting to create something amazing that fills a unique market gap. Helping to deliver on our vision for this new class of product, we worked with the team at AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group. In close collaboration, we designed a new semi-custom graphics chip, which means this is also a great example of how we can compete and work together, ultimately delivering innovation that is good for consumers.