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In a bid to build better chips for gamers and other PC enthusiasts, Intel has announced the 8th-generation H-series mobile processors will have a feature that's nothing short of astonishing: they'll integrate AMD GPUs.

The 8th-generation mobile processors currently on the market are U-series chips. These are 15W processors using a revised version of the 7th-generation Kaby Lake architecture. The GPUs of these chips are part of the same piece of silicon as the CPU. In moving from 7th to 8th generation, the number of CPU cores and threads doubled to four and eight respectively. Aside from some minor changes however, the GPUs' portions are largely unchanged since the 6th-generation Skylake.

H-series chips have a bigger power envelope; for the 7th generation, the chip can draw up to 45W. In the past, they've used that higher power rating to support more cores and higher clock speeds—they've had four cores and eight threads for several generations now—but they've sported substantially the same integrated GPUs as the low-power parts.

For the 8th generation, that's going to change. The chip package will contain multiple pieces of silicon: an Intel CPU, a custom-built AMD Radeon GPU, and stacked second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). Connecting the GPU and its memory is Intel's new "Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge" (EMIB), a high-speed, short-range interconnect that Intel has designed to join different chips within a single package. Intel says that EMIB enables the creation of faster, thinner packages, enabling the multi-chip module to fit into slimline laptop form factors.

More: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/intel-will-ship-processors-with-integrated-amd-graphics-and-memory/?comments=1

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