Intel AMD Hybrid Kaby Lake-G Processor Proves Powerful In First Real-World Evaluations

A few months back, Intel revealed that it was working with AMD to being a family of processors to market featuring on-package Radeon RX Vega graphics. This move seemed quizzical considering the bitter rivalry between the two companies in the CPU space, but the partnership appears to have paid off handsomely if the first benchmarks in retail-ready products are any indication.

Intel’s Kaby Lake-G family of processors pair an 8th Generation Core CPU complex with an AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU and 4GB of bleeding-edge HBM2 memory on a single package, through the use of something Intel calls an EMIB, or Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge. The architecture and designs of the CPU, GPU, and HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory), and the use of the EMIB, allowed Intel to piece together a powerful compute engine in a low-profile package that’s not much bigger than a typical processor. Versus a traditional CPU and discrete GPU setup, however, Kaby Lake-G is downright tiny.

The first products I’ve gotten to see and evaluate first-hand leveraging Kaby Lake-G are the brand-new Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 and Intel NUC8i7HVK small form factor PC, codenamed Hades Canyon. Comprehensive, multi-page reviews of both products went on-line in the last 24 hours. If you head on over to HotHardware you can see all of the benchmarks and analysis for yourself – there’s too much to share here. What you’ll see if you peruse the images and numbers though is that Kaby Lake-G is somewhat of a beast that crushes previous-generation products in similar form factors.

The Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 is a thin-and-light convertible Ultrabook and the Intel NUC8i7HVK is a tiny, full-blown PC that can fit in one hand – it measures only 221 x 142 x 39 mm (1.2 L). Compared to other Ultrabooks and small form factor PCs, there is simply no comparison. The quad-core / eight thread CPUs incorporated into Kaby Lake-G offer best-in-class performance, while the integrated Radeon RX Vega M graphics cores are simply in another league versus any other on-processor, integrated solution. Even versus a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150, there is no comparison.

Faster and more powerful processors and GPUs are available, of course, but not in the same kind of form factors enabled by Kaby Lake-G. Intel and AMD have collaborated on a groundbreaking product here, and now that I’ve had the chance to test it for myself, I can’t wait to see what other interesting products featuring Kaby Lake-G come to market and if the unlikely collaboration between Intel and AMD continues to bear fruit.