Intel, AMD To Team Up On 8th Generation Mobile Chips

Intel, AMD To Team Up On 8th Generation Mobile Chips

- John Burek, Matt Safford

Dogs and cats living together? Intel and AMD in one chip? We’d have bet first on the felines and canines hooking up. A blockbuster blog post from Intel’s Christopher Walker, vice president of the Client Computing Group and general manager of the Mobile Client Platform, and backed by reporting from several other outlets confirms the previously unthinkable. Intel and AMD will join forces on a high-performance mobile CPU that will combine Intel’s Core processor technology and AMD’s discrete graphics.

It is unclear whether this will be a single version of a single chip or a series of CPUs. Intel is cagily referring to this rollout as a “new product, which will be part of our 8th Gen Intel Core family.” Even though this new chip or chips will service just a niche of the market—thin-design laptops that require high-performance graphics, presumably including some gaming machines—this is a watershed moment in the landscape for mobile CPUs and GPUs, with these two bitter CPU rivals collaborating in such an unprecedented way.

Note that the CPU and GPU elements are combined in one unit; this is distinct from the typical design in a gaming laptop or other power machine, in which a CPU with integrated graphics is augmented by a separate, discrete graphics chip, with the two hosted on the mainboard separately.

The Intel/AMD collaboration doesn’t yet have a formal name, and indeed, the details are somewhat sketchy. But here are the key things we know so far.