8th Generation Intel Kaby Lake-G CPU with an AMD RX Vega M GPU

8th Generation Intel Kaby Lake-G CPU with an AMD RX Vega M GPU



Comparison of the 100W, GH graphics Kaby Lake-G against a Kaby Lake-H paired with an Nvidia GTX 1060 MaxQ GPU.

Kaby Lake-G unveiled: Intel CPU, AMD GPU, Nvidia-beating performance
New hybrid chips should offer a compelling alternative to discrete GPUs.
PETER BRIGHT - 1/8/2018, 9:28 AM
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...intel-cpu-amd-gpu-nvidia-beating-performance/

Here's some recent coverage from CES 2018:

$1369 HP Spectre x360 15 (2018) with AMD RX Vega M GPU

Dell's XPS 15 (2018): Kaby Lake G in a convertible design

Dell XPS 15 convertible with Intel Kaby Lake-G (Intel CPU & AMD graphics)

Intel Kaby Lake-G (Vega GPU) Laptops and NUC

Intel's Hades Canyon NUC has serious gaming chops

 

Early Test Of Hybrid Intel-AMD CPU In Dell XPS 15 Laptop Showcases Powerful Tag Team Chip
Dave Altavilla , JAN 18, 2018 @ 03:30 PM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveal...howcases-powerful-tag-team-chip/#7aaec98e1fa9

"When news broke of Intel’s cooperation to design a processor with its archrival AMD, many felt it sounded a lot like “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA,” to quote the comic genius of Bill Murray.

However, as odd as it may seem, Intel’s collaboration with AMD to integrate Sunnyvale’s Radeon RX Vega graphics core on the same chip packaging as its 8th Gen Core series processor, makes for a powerful 1-2 punch combination for thin and light laptops.

Now known as Kaby Lake G, or more officially as Intel’s 8th Generation Core Processor With AMD Radeon RX Vega M Graphics, the chip offers some of Intel’s fastest quad-core mobile CPU technology, combined with AMD’s Radeon Vega GPU core and coupled with 4 Gigabytes of fast HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory).

Spoiler: Details...

The chip connects these various elements up with something Intel calls an EMIB (Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge), that provides high-speed data transfer between all of its high-performance subsystems. Targeted at premium, thin and light laptops, as you can imagine, OEM partners are chomping at the bit to flesh out systems based on this dynamic duo.

And as it turns out, Dell was one of first out of the gate with a new machine based on it, ushering in CES 2018 last week."

Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 Laptop Convertible


Intel 8th Gen Processor With AMD Radeon RX Vega M Graphics

"The Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 is a full re-spin of Dell’s successful XPS 15 platform, only now it’s thinner and lighter with a brighter, 400 nit, high-contrast IGZO display and 360-degree full swing hinges.

Strapped with its legacy gorgeous machined aluminum chassis and hybrid carbon fiber construction in the palm rest area, the new 4.5 pound XPS 15 2-In-1 is a looker to be sure, but as HotHardware can attest to with some hands-on time, its hybrid Intel-AMD power plant also should deliver serious gaming and multimedia chops as well.

In fact, at CES in Las Vegas last week, Dell was allowing select members of the press a quick spin around the test track with the machine in Square Enix’s Rise Of The Tomb Raider. This game engine delivers great visuals and is capable of running in the latest DirectX 12 rendering mode as well."

Rise Of The Tomb Raider

"In testing, at a resolution of 1920x1080 with High image quality settings, the Dell machine was able to put up frame rates at about 35 FPS. Conversely, other laptops based on standard Intel 8th Gen Core processors and integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics (without the AMD Vega GPU) are barely able to run the game at all, and only muster 8 FPS at Medium quality settings (High IQ would not run).

As a further point of reference, HotHardware ran an Acer machine based on Intel’s 8th Gen Core series, in combination with a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX 150 GPU (with 2GB of GDDR5), and that machine was able to put up about 24 FPS at the same settings.

Either way you slice it, not only was Dell’s machine able to maintain at least playable frame rates but it took these legacy graphics solutions for thin and light machines out behind the woodshed for a beating.

It’s still early, however, projections from Intel are that its Kaby Lake G, AMD-infused hybrid chip should be able to surpass the performance of even a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 mobile GPU as well.

This bodes well for potential further design wins with the chip for Intel and AMD, though as of yet only Dell and HP have officially announced laptops employing the new silicon.

HP’s Spectre x360 15 2-In-1 with the chip was also on display at CES but HP wasn’t allowing testing just yet. Regardless, you can expect these machines to hit the market fairly soon, with Dell going on record as shipping in the Spring."

 

Intel Kaby Lake G Vega M release date, specs, and performance
By Dave James, 23 January 2018
https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel-kaby-lake-g-vega-m-release-date-specifications

"Intel and AMD have teamed up to knock Nvidia off their mobile GPU perch, and deliver on the promise of sleek and powerful gaming laptops. That means the new AMD Vega M-powered Kaby Lake G CPUs can outpace a GTX 1060 Max-Q machine while using less juice. Excited yet?

It's the first week of January and the Christmas truce is well and truly over - the hardware wars can begin again in earnest. CES has seen the opening salvos being fired; just as Nvidia are started their opening press conference of the big tech show Intel announced their plans to break Nvidia's stranglehold on the mainstream mobile gaming market.

Spoiler: Vital Stats...

Vital stats

• Intel Kaby Lake G release date
  Machines sporting Intel's new Radeon-powered processors will start to appear from March onwards. Intel's own Hades Canyon NUC mini-desktop will ship in late-March.
• Intel Kaby Lake G specifications
  There are two main variants of the Vega M graphics core at the heart of the Kaby Lake G chips - one with 20 CUs and 1,280 GCN cores and another with 24 CUs and 1,536 GCN cores. Both have 4GB HBM2 as standard. All the CPU components will be four-core, eight-thread, even the Core i5 parts.
• Intel Kaby Lake G architecture
  They're using the older Kaby Lake 14nm design for the CPU parts of the G-series chips, with a semi-custom Radeon Vega chip plumbed in via PCIe 3.0. The Vega M is connected to the HBM2 memory via Intel's own EMIB interconnect.
• Intel Kaby Lake G performance
  Intel are promising Nvidia-beating game performance from both the Vega M GH and Vega M GL variants, with the 24 CU chips out-pacing a GTX 1060 Max-Q by 10% and the 20 CU parts besting a GTX 1050 by up to 40% in gaming tests.

________________________________________________

The new Kaby Lake G processors are promising to bring us mainstream gaming laptops without the need for hot and heavy discrete Nvidia, or AMD, graphics chips attached to them. The space-saving alone could allow for laptop designs with bigger batteries, larger, quieter fans, or simply shrunken, lower power gaming-capable notebooks.

This mixing of Intel Cores and Radeon Vega graphics silicon is indicative of just how badly both companies want to squeeze Nvidia out of the lucrative gaming laptop space. Over the last three years the game-ready notebook market has seen a 42% compound annual growth rate, and that’s in a world where Apple is trying to tell you the computer is dead and everybody else says that no-one buys PCs anymore.

Despite their acrimonious past relationships AMD and Intel have settled some of their differences - cold, hard cash can be such an effective mediator - because as every good Total War player knows, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or y'know, my semi-custom GPU supplier.

Intel Kaby Lake G release date

After an initial pre-CES launch announcement this January we're not actually going to start seeing machines rocking the new Intel/AMD hybrid chips until Spring of this year. Essentially we're taking that to mean late-March for pretty much everything Kaby Lake G / Vega M related.

Intel have themselves stated that their own Vega M GH-powered Hades Canyon NUC is going to be shipping to the market in late-March and we doubt there will be many laptop manufacturers beating Intel to the shelves with Vega M notebooks. Though we do know that Dell and HP will definitely have systems using the new chips.

Whether we'll actually see Vega M GH laptops is going to be down to the individual manufacturers. Intel have certainly only been talking about the 100W top part as something for their desktop NUC designs, but we're desperate to see all 1,536 GCN cores being put to use in a small-scale, 1080p, 60fps-capable, gaming notebook. One that shouldn't melt the flesh from our laps, or exacerbate the declining sperm-counts of half the population.

Intel Kaby Lake G specifications

"It’s the AMD portion of the new Intel processors which is the interesting bit. The actual CPU component is about as boring as you can get - they’re all using the dreadfully dull Kaby Lake 14nm architecture. There probably needs to be some form of + behind that lithography, but I’m growing increasingly weary of Intel’s attempts to pretend the same production process is in any way new with every CPU release.

That means it’s all four cores and eight threads across the board, with none of the six-core excitement that’s set to enthuse the mobile market when they finally get around to releasing the Intel Coffee Lake H-series parts later on in the year

There is, however, some mild level of interest around the Core i5 chip - Intel have allowed it some HyperThreading lovin’ and let it have eight threads of its own to play with. That makes it unlike most Core i5 processors around and means the only difference between it and the Core i7 parts is that it’s got slightly lower clockspeeds and less total cache.

But, as I said, it’s the Vega M GPU where things are really interesting, and we’ve got two different variants of the GPU on offer. There is the Vega M GH and Vega M GL, essentially that plays out as Vega M Graphics High and Graphics Low.

The top-level Vega M GH part is only being used in Core i7 G-series chips, and comes with the full complement of 24 compute units (CUs). There are 64 GCN cores in each CU and therefore 1,536 cores in the total GPU package. The core and boost GPU frequencies are inevitably much lower than Vega’s desktop counterparts, but topping out at just under 1,200MHz is still a pretty decent clockspeed for the chips to achieve under those power-constricted, 100W TDP environs.

By comparison the Vega M GL processors have 20 CUs inside them, giving them a total of 1,280 GCN cores. For reference that’s 256 more cores than the RX 560’s Polaris GPU contains. Because these chips are sporting a 65W TDP they necessarily have a lower set of clockspeeds, only just topping the 1GHz mark under maximum boost conditions.

Interesting it looks like the lower spec chips also have half the render output units too, with the GL GPUs only offering 32 pixels per clock cycle compared with the GH’s 64 pixels per clock cycle. This is most relevant when we’re talking about post-processing and anti-aliasing - those settings might need to take a step down when you’re gaming on the lower-spec GPUs.

In terms of the memory, all of the G-series chips are making do with 4GB of second-gen high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) directly attached to the GPU.

There is also a single unlocked part in the G-series range, the Core i7 8809G. That’s the chip which recently appeared on Intel’s own list of unlocked processors, so I guess that’s not much of a shock.

It does mean that with the i7 8809G you’ll get to use both AMD’s WattMan and Intel’s XTU overclocking apps. Oh, lucky you... But the entire chip is unlocked so do you get access to tweaking the nuts off the CPU, GPU, and the HBM2 memory. The other four G-series processors, however, are completely locked down. That would likely indicate that the 8809G will remain the go-to chip for mini desktop PCs, such as the Hades Canyon NUC, and probably won’t be the Vega M GH chip that finds its way into the higher-spec G-series laptops.

The i7 8809G and 8709G will be the two chips that go inside the Hades Canyon NUC mini PCs, and Intel’s John Deatherage, the NUC marketing director, was actually calling them “the Intel VR machine” in a recent briefing call. You can see why they’re being codenamed Hades Canyon when the marketing director has a name like DEATHeRAGE…

They will be remarkably powerful little machines, but it might be a bit of a stretch for them to really be able to keep up with the graphical demands of VR gaming. I understand the bar is being lowered on the GPU front, but I think you’d probably struggle getting Fallout 4 VR running nicely on the NUC.

Intel Kaby Lake G architecture

The underlying architectures of the new Vega M-powered Kaby Lake G chips are all pretty much known quantities right now, all apart from the intricacies of the embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB) that is.

The Kaby Lake CPU architecture is over a year-old now, having been released into our test benches just before Christmas last year. It’s also almost identical to the 14nm Skylake architecture released back in 2015. So yeah, like I say, it’s a known quantity…

Since its launch last year, the AMD Vega GPU architecture is fairly well understood too. Key parts of its design are the Rapid Packed Math (RPM) and High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC) features. RPM essentially allows the GPU to execute two mathematical instructions for the price of one, though with a little less accuracy. That’s not an issue in gaming as we don’t need the 32-bit precision you might need on the professional side of data management.

The HBCC component allows the GPU to utilise a portion of system memory as an extended frame buffer, which might come in handy given that you’re only getting 4GB of video memory with the Vega M design. This high-speed memory controller also comes in handy utilising that 4GB of HBM2 memory to is fullest. Having a 1,024-bit memory bus means there’s a lot of bandwidth flying around, with the GH and GL variants having 205GB/s and 179GB/s of memory bandwidth respectively.

What you also get with the Vega GPU is access to all of AMD’s recent software advances. The recent AMD Adrenalin update has improved on their consistent improvements, and is their best driver release in an age. For this sort of mobile chip the Radeon Chill feature will be excellent, allowing practically invisible energy, and therefore battery, saving while gaming. You also get access to FreeSync and FreeSync 2.

But how Intel have brought all this together is arguably the most interesting part of the whole design. They purchased the semi-custom AMD Vega GPU in whole, but have used their own EMIB to connect it to the HBM2. EMIB is a method, which Intel unveiled last year, that allows them to link different architectures and silicon designs together using a high-throughput interconnect.



What they haven’t done, however, is use the EMIB technology to connect the Vega GPU to the Intel Core CPU. That connection is handled by a very traditional eight-lane PCIe 3.0 bridge, leaving a further eight lanes available to the CPU for PCIe-based storage.

This is where AMD could potentially be able to improve on what Intel have done with their GPU when it comes to producing higher-spec Ryzen Mobile parts. Using their own Infinity Fabric connection tech to have the CPU and GPU all within a single chip ought to give it a bit of an edge over the Intel Vega M design - which is still essentially just a discrete GPU and CPU combo, not an efficient single chip setup. But whether AMD will actually produce any larger-scale Ryzen Mobile processors is looking less and less likely, especially not ones with the sort of GCN core-count this semi-custom GPU is sporting, or with the HBM2 VRAM either.

But Intel would likely argue their software-based dynamic power sharing will take care of any differences in efficiency that might arise between the two different methods team red and team blue are using to get Vega into mobile form. Intel are claiming almost 20% efficiency gains by using this Dynamic Tuning feature.

Vega also contains a per-CU power gating system, which allows the GPU to shut down entire clusters of GCN cores if they’re not required. And, because the G-series are based on Kaby Lake-H mobile parts you are also getting Intel HD graphics for the times when you don’t need the high-performance Radeon GPU and want to save juice. Though I think Intel might be overstating it a little by saying the G-series package contains “two amazing graphics subsystems.”

Intel Kaby Lake G performance

We’re going to have to take Intel’s word for the Kaby Lake G chips’ performance as it’s going to be a while before we see genuine machines sporting the new processors actually arrive on our test benches. Hopefully by then we’ll have a greater range of AMD Ryzen Mobile notebooks to put them up against.

And, who knows, maybe Nvidia will launch Volta-based notebook parts by the end of March this year too. Yeah, I’m not even convincing myself…

In Intel’s own hand-picked benchmarks, however, we’re seeing the top-spec Vega M G-series parts capable of outperforming laptops running GTX 1060 Max-Q by around 10% on average, offering 60 fps at high 1080p settings. That’s genuinely impressive, even given the fact the Max-Q Design chips will generally run around 10% slower than a standard Nvidia mobile GPU anyway. We’re talking then about the Vega M GH potentially hitting the same level of performance as a $1,500+ gaming laptop.

Now, imagine how expensive Kaby Lake G laptops are going to be…



Whether that’s going to be enough raw GPU performance for the Vega M GH-based Hades Canyon NUCs to really be able to claim genuine VR gaming performance is yet to be seen. They’re calling it their virtual reality machine, but you might struggle to get the most demanding of VR titles running at a smooth enough rate so as not to make you lose both your lunch and/or your dignity.



The Vega GL variants compare even more favourably to the respective Nvidia components, with the Intel benchmarks showing between 30% and 40% performance improvements for the Intel chip up against the GTX 1050 mobile chip. Obviously those are going to be the best-case scenarios picked by Intel’s benchmarking team, but it still looks pretty good.

They not shown up against the GTX 1050 Ti, but given that GPU’s TDP is almost the same as the entirety of the GPU and CPU of the 65W Vega M GL part, that’s understandable. You’re not going to be getting 60fps at high 1080p settings with the Vega M GL, but even knocking around the 40fps mark is still pretty decent. Though those are purely the average figures, it will be interesting to note the minimum fps and frame time scores of both the Vega M G-series chips."

 

Early benchmark released for Intel's new Core i7-8705G CPU with on-board AMD Radeon Vega graphics
by Sam Medley, 2018/01/21
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Early...-board-AMD-Radeon-Vega-graphics.279332.0.html

"Some early benchmarks of the new Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 taken at CES 2018 show some impressive power from the new Intel Core i7-8705G CPU paired with on-board AMD Vega graphics. While these benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt, game performance hovers just below Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050."

"Intel’s new Kaby Lake-G processors are perhaps the most exciting piece of technology to come out of CES this year. That excitement will surely build with the latest news about the chips. Early benchmarks from the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1, which is powered by Intel’s Core i7-8705G, peg gaming performance around that of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050.

The benchmark comes from Hot Hardware. The site was able to run a few quick runs of the Rise of the Tomb Raider built-in benchmark, and performance is nothing short of impressive for an integrated GPU solution. Running at High settings at Full HD (1920x1080), the benchmark scored about 35 frames per second.

While this isn’t terribly impressive compared to dedicated solutions like Nvidia’s own GeForce GTX 1050 (which scores about 38 fps), it’s incredible considering that the AMD Vega M GPU in the machine is an on-chip graphics solution, not a separate card. Comparatively, Intel’s own HD Graphics 620 only hits about 6.25 frames per second according to our database. Check out the comparison below (keep in mind that our benchmark for this title differs slightly from the built-in benchmark):

Frames per second: Rise of the Tomb Raider (High, 1920x1080)
GPU FPS
GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q 67.5
GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 45.8
Geforce GTX 1050 38.4
Core i7-8705G (AMD Vega M) 34.9
GeForce MX150 20.6
Intel HD Graphics 620 6.25

Keep in mind that this benchmark was performed on early hardware (read: not a final release) and was done quickly. It’s possible that AMD and Intel will be able to squeeze out a bit more performance when the Kaby Lake-G platform starts appearing in commercially available laptops. It’ll be very interesting to see how the silicon performs with better-developed design and drivers. If this benchmark is any indication of future performance, the future is looking very bright for Kaby Lake-G and onboard graphics in general."

 

This is going to be the UGLIEST intel cpu imma see in my life!