The Strange Partnership Between Intel And AMD

Everybody knows about the rivalry between Intel and AMD🥶. Since they are the only two companies who manufacture CPU’s for both consumers and servers, it is not something that started in two or three years ago. We have seen the fan boys from both team fighting, arguing that their company got the best solution or has the highest performing CPU😎. The same trend continued between the companies itself in the last decade by comparing their flagship CPU’s against the competitor’s ones during launch events. So it’s nothing new!🤷‍♂️ But what if I told you that these rivals actually partnered once?😕 Yes! And that’s how Kaby lake G processor was born.

Back in January 2018, Intel launched a bunch of newly designed 8^th gen CPU’s along with a custom build Radeon RX Vega M graphics from AMD. It was the breaking news among tech enthusiast back then. Both vendors thought that their collaboration would present a greater challenge to the Nvidia in notebook market. In fact, the Kaby lake G processors enabled the notebook manufactures like Dell, HP etc to give more computing power without the addition of a dedicated GPU👍. This additional space can be used for providing better features like more cooling,better battery etc to customers. One of the most attractive thing about the Kaby lake G processors was notebooks built on these were lighter and thinner without compromising much on computing power and efficiency.   

On spec, this whole deal was a promising one. i7-8706G, 8705G, 8809G, 8305G, 8709G, 8706G and a i5-8305G was the Kaby lake G processor line-up. The i7-8809G was the flagship in this series with a CPU clock boost of 4.2Ghz with 4c/8T while having a TDP of 100W. The discrete RX Vega M had a max clock speed of 1190Mhz with 24 compute units and a 1024bit@204GB/s memory bus.

But that partnership didn’t last long since Intel announced that they are discontinuing the project on October,2019 and asked laptop manufactures who are still interested in Kaby lake G processors to submit their orders by January this year😑. There are a couple of reasons which forced Intel to do so. One is obviously the lack of interest by OEM’s and another one is the announcement of Intel to enter the GPU market, so partnering with a rival was not something good for Intel. But the blue team has already stated that consumers will get updates for at least 3 more years.