Intel has agreed on a deal with AMD to feature the company’s graphics technology alongside its CPUs, according to a new report from Fudzilla. The deal, which has been rumoured for some months, will see AMD replace NVIDIA, Intel’s previous graphics partner. NVIDIA’s deal with Intel ended on 17th March, 2017. “We can confirm rumours that Intel has […] written a cheque to licence AMD’s graphics,” writes Fudzilla’s Fuad Abazovic.
NVIDIA’s Acrimonious Relationship with Intel
It comes as no surprise that Intel has opted for a deal with AMD, rather than extend its existing deal with NVIDIA. Seven years ago, NVIDIA sued Intel, accusing its partner of anticompetitive practices and licencing of the nForce chipset. Intel settled the case with a $1.5 billion payment over five years. When it came to agreeing on a new graphics deal, AMD was the only option that remained.
AMD Graphics Deal in the Works Since December 2016?
HardOCP Editor-in-Chief Kyle Bennett first reported the rumoured deal between Intel and AMD in December 2016. “The licensing deal between AMD and Intel is signed and done for putting AMD GPU tech into Intel’s iGPU,” Bennett reported on 5th December.
Official Announcement?
Until we have official confirmation from either party, the above report remains a rumour. We do know, though, that AMD is hosting a special event tomorrow to discuss its future. Vega, Zen 2, and Navi will feature at the Sunnyvale event on 16th May, so what better time for AMD to announce its new deal with Intel?
OK, then…as things are going as for AMD APUs for AM4, non-existent, i guess that soon i will start to buy APUs from Intel and respective MoBos…it seems that’s the way AMD wants or not longer really gives a s**t for Desktop APUs.
I wanted Bristol Ridge AM4, waited about a year for it, then gave up and bought a Pentium G4560. So yes, it’s annoying that AMD has left desktop APU’s. I’m guessing it’s just too small a market. Still, they should be back with Raven Ridge.
I think real reason is that they still have a s*** load of Trinity, Richland and Kaveri APUs in stock and need to move them 1st.
Can’t think it’s that many. If it is, it’s because nobody is buying them, which goes back to my point. If they thought that Bristol Ridge would sell, they’d have released it long ago, old stock or no old stock.
If they release new stuff, people will let old stuff to rotten.
This actually was problem with a too fast “evolution” from Trinity to Kaveri and to make things worse, the real problem is that anyone that buys a FM2/FM2+ APU and MoBo knows that there is no evolution path at all. That hit their sells.
Bristol Ridge should have be launched (witch in practice, it wasn’t even for AM4)…as a FM2+ APU, never as AM4 (potential) APU.
I myself stopped to make more APU builds because of that…FM2+ is a dead end (because AMD decided so) and there is no AM4 APUs at all, so i also not buying AM4 MoBos, instead i’m now building with cheapest Intel mITX mobos and CPUs, and cheap dGPU, GT 730 and last remains of GTX 750 that i can find…my perspectives as for near future dGPUs is GT 1030.
AMD made their choices, i make mine.
AMD had a lot of time to reduce stocks of FM2+. Desktop BR has been available for OEM’s since September 2016, and AMD has been planning the transition even before. So it doesn’t make sense to me that it would be stock preventing them from releasing BR.
The only reason I can see for AMD not to release BR AM4 is that is thinks it won’t sell. From the benchmarks I’ve seen it’s a bit of a downgrade in performance from the top of the line FM2+ APU’s, so is likely to not get great reviews on enthusiast sites, and it’s not even as power efficient as its 65W TDP might suggest. Personally I still think it would sell, but AMD might be thinking that Raven Ridge isn’t too far, and it’s not that good to mar the AM4 CPU performance image with slow APU’s.
Yeah, that’s indeed also one of the reasons, relative poor BR performance that would taint AM4 platform…i blame AMD for that for reducing FURTHER the L2 cache in BR…as if it wasn’t enough that there is no L3 in all these APUs from Trinity to BR, they add to cut even more the L2 cache in BR, totally insane O_o
The excavator core was meant to be small and frugal in power use, and a smaller cache saves both space and power. But I think that AMD also made a conscious decision not to release anything with more cache so it doesn’t get in the way of Zen. Clock for clock, Excavator is over 30% faster than Piledriver in quite a few tasks (that don’t depend on the cache that much). If it had a decent sized cache, it would have likely had pretty good performance. That would have made the performance jump for Zen less impressive, and Ryzen would have been less attractive to some buyers, if they already had a chip that’s significantly faster than Piledriver. As is, Excavator served its purpose as a decent stop gap for mobile, while leaving the desktop open for Ryzen.
I’d wait for more details. It could be a patent licensing deal or a deal for actual technologies. Even if it’s for actual technologies, it may be for specific products, not the entire Intel CPU line.
I think it’s just a patent license – even so that should add a reasonable amount income to AMD’s bottom line, but don’t expect it to be a lot – 50 to 100m a year.
If it’s also to get access to more than just the patents required to implement your own graphics IP, then the payment will be higher. And ultimately, there could be purchasing either hard macro silicon designs, or even including AMD graphics dies alongside Intel CPU dies.
Raven Ridge is coming along soon however for AMD, so I doubt they would want to go too far with making Intel’s CPUs more attractive.
‘Soon’ isn’t necessarily that soon though. For mobile, perhaps, but not for desktop.
I don’t think AMD would have a problem with its graphics on Intel CPU’s, even if that hurt it potentially hurts APU bottom line. Having AMD GPU’s on Intel chips will not only get AMD money but will also mean that most people will be using AMD GPU’s. That means a software ecosystem that takes AMD GPU’s better into account.
In any case, I’m sure that AMD expects Ryzen to win market share from Intel even if Intel uses AMD graphics.