Intel working on mobile CPUs with AMD Vega GPU tech

Intel has been rumored to be working with AMD for a while on a CPU that would feature AMD Radeon GPU technology, but until now it has been rumor. New rumors have surfaced, teasing that Intel is working on a new CPU with Vega GPU technology inside.

The new rumor is coming from a purported slide from Intel that says "Vega Inside, Mobile Performance Outside", which leads us to believe that Intel is working on a new mobile CPU that will feature Vega GPU inside. AMD released their Vega architecture a couple of months ago now, starting with Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and finishing up with Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition with a few SKUs in between. We haven't seen any low/mid-range Vega parts yet, but it wouldn't surprise me to see them in an Intel processor first, either.

Intel's recently released Coffee Lake family of processors still uses the same GPU technology that was inside of Kaby Lake, but the upcoming mobile-aimed Coffee Lake-H processors might see Vega inside. Further up the roadmap we have Cannon Lake which will be released in the Y-series family, which will come in 2018 on 10nm... this could also rock Vega tech.

Furthermore, the technological side of this is tricky. You can't just slap Vega into a laptop easily, it is a power hungry mofo and gets hotter than the surface of the sun under load. Notebooks are notorious for not having the best cooling for fully-loaded GPUs, but Vega is an entire new bag of tricks when it comes to heat and power. Intel hasn't spent years getting to the point they're at now with great battery life on mobile processors, to throw in a power-hungry Vega chip that also needs a huge load of copper cooling it.

We could see an on-die MCM chip design that would see Intel using a multi-die interconnect bridge that would drive everything between the CPU and GPU, meaning Intel's own CPU technology would have large enough bandwidth to talk to the Vega GPU through the massive bandwidth over the die-to-die interconnects. This would make massive sense for AMD's push into the High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC) that Vega has, but currently has nearly zero use for.

HBCC could be the magic AMD needs to be relevant in a world where mobile CPU technology has become boring, as we could possibly have next-gen Intel/AMD-powered notebooks that are actually good for gamers (1080p 60FPS) with good battery life. HBCC along with HBM2 and some tricky, new, and exciting interconnect technology is definitely capable of it, but now Intel needs to pull it off.

At the end of the day, just the thought of an Intel CPU with AMD Vega GPU technology is freaking exciting. It's like a DC/Marvel crossover and seeing Superman fight Captain America while Batman fights Iron Man... it doesn't matter that the movie would probably be junk story-wise, I just want to see my favorite heroes, and in this case - technology companies, working together.