If you’re one heck of a hardware enthusiast, or just love PC modding in general, you will know that AMD and Intel and NVIDIA behave like three immiscible liquids. Their arguments over who makes the best hardware is famous all over the hardware industry. A Wall Street Journal report actually reported what can never possibly be true – that AMD and Intel are teaming up! An official announcement from Intel on the same thing actually confirms the statement, which can be seen here :
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rivals-intel-and-amd-team-up-on-pc-chips-to-battle-nvidia-1509966064
Nope, it is not the 1st of April, but rather the 1st week of November, so this statement is far from being a prank. Maybe we have shifted to another dimension due to certain inter-universal phenomena? I don’t know, that might have happened, but in this alternate timeline, the news is a truth. Or maybe we’re just not believing what is actually happening before our eyes, and trying to act naive.
Looking at the current crop of gaming laptops on the market, Intel said it recognized an opportunity to build thinner, lighter, and more powerful enthusiast mobile platforms aimed at delivering a premium experience.
“Currently, most enthusiast mobile PCs have Intel Core H-series processors plus higher-powered discrete graphics, resulting in systems that average 26mm in height. Compare this to thin and light laptops that are trending down to 16mm or less, with some even as thin as 11 mm. We wanted to find a way to improve this,” Intel said.
The new chip package consists of the Intel 8th generation Core H-series processors with second generation high bandwidth memory HBM2 and custom discrete graphics from AMD. Intel says that the silicon footprint of this new chip will be lesser than half the standard discrete graphics components on a motherboard, so the laptops built using it will be thinner.
A silicon bridge,called the Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge, is a high speed connector that connects the discrete Radeon graphics card and the Intel Core H-series processor. Thanks to the bridge, the interaction speeds between the graphics unit, the memory and the processor is extremely high. Not only that, HBM2 memory stacked up on the bridge means that valuable board space that would be reserved otherwise for first generation GDDR5 memories can be conserved, and board space can be conserved, leading to thinner, smaller and more portable devices. Power sharing between the memory, the graphics unit and the processor is another feature making this new architecture a success.
A date when the laptops powered by this new architecture will hit the market hasn’t been announced, but both Intel and AMD representatives are positive that it will happen soon. This is all to satisfy the customers who want a portable solution for AAA gaming, VR work as well as other graphics intensive tasks, besides the usual computing, which heavily depends on the processor.