It’s Intel’s 50th birthday today, so to celebrate this remarkable milestone we thought we’d create a rundown of all the latest Intel news that has surrounded this very important year. We’re big advocates of Intel, and have long used their extensive range of high-performance processors across our line-up of Rack and Mini PCs. In fact, every one of our products now supports Intel’s latest 8th generation of chips, from their i3 CPU all the way to the range-topping i7-8700k. The chipmaker has always been a lead innovator in what is an increasingly competitive market, and is still continuing to pioneer incredible shifts that challenge the conventions of CPU design.
The thin line between love and hate: Intel and AMD
Intel and AMD have been rivals longer than we can remember. That’s why it took us completely by surprise when Intel announced that they would be working with their arch nemesis on a new mobile chip embedded with AMD’s Radeon RX Vega M graphics. This unexpected partnership was announced back in November, with the chips officially launched at CES in January. Since then, the hybrid love-child, dubbed Kaby Lake G, has been gradually making an appearance, including inside Intel’s new Hades Canyon NUC8i7HVK.
Using Intel’s Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) to connect chips, the result is a much slicker, more portable chip that, because it places the CPU and GPU in closer proximity, means a lot more control and greater performance. The idea is that it will be ideally suited to ultra-thin devices, or else create much-needed space in thicker laptops and notebooks. So far, beyond the stir that the partnership itself has created, the Kaby Lake G has already been met with lots of excitement, and is proving itself a worthy representation of two of the world’s chipmaking titans.
We, like Intel, have recently made the foray towards AMD by implementing their Ryzen CPUs into our PCs, and are beginning to really understand the appeal of these ground-breaking chips.
All’s fair in chips and war
In spite of their temporary handshake, not all is at peace between Intel and AMD. To mark its 50th anniversary, Intel gave away 8086 of its new 8th generation i7-8086k processors last month in a one-off sweepstake. AMD recently responded to this act of generosity by encouraging those lucky enough to have bagged one of the i7 chips to exchange them for their Threadripper 1950X processors instead. Intel jovially bit back over Twitter, stating “@AMDRyzen, if you wanted an Intel Core i7-8086K processor too, you could have just asked us.”
What’s next for Intel?
Just to shake things up even further, Intel is now working on its very own discrete graphics card, looking to go head-to-head with both AMD and NVIDIA in the high-performance graphics space. At the moment, there are next-to-no details on what we can expect from this GPU, but what we do know is that it will be making an appearance sometime in 2020 – a very exciting prospect indeed.
If you would like to find out more about the diverse range of processors and graphics cards options we have on offer within our PCs, or else learn more about the future of Intel’s chips, please get in touch.
