In Cahoots?

IT WOULD BE REMISS

of us not to mention AMD and Intel’s recent partnership in bringing one of the world’s first Radeon and Intel powered SOC Ultrabook combos together. The aim is to reduce the overall form factor of gaming notebooks, from the usual 26mm thickness to something more classy and compatible with the Ultrabook form factor, without compromising on performance. To do this, Intel’s taking advantage of its EMIB interconnect to incorporate HBM 2.0 memory stacks, a bespoke Radeon GPU core, and its own Intel processors, to reduce the footprint of its internal componentry significantly. We’ve yet to receive confirmation as to whether this will be a Vega or Polaris powered GPU, but it looks promising.

EMIB is a multi-die interposer technology, which allows Intel to incorporate multiple individual dies, at varying processing node sizes, across a single substrate, in very close proximity. So, for instance, you could see a processor using a 10nm process, with a graphics core at 14nm, and the dedicated I/O chip at 22nm, all within a single millimeter of each other, without issue. This leads to a cheap, small-formfactor interconnect that reduces power draw, temperature, height, and cost, with very little difficulty for the partners involved.

We expect to see Ultrabooks powered by this new technology in the first quarter of 2018, potentially revolutionizing performance in the ultra-slim form factor sector of the industry.