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Arch-rivals Intel and AMD Team Up on PC Chips To Battle Nvidia (pcworld.com)
Intel and AMD, arch-rivals for decades, are teaming up to thwart a common competitor, Nvidia. On Monday, the two companies said they are co-designing an Intel Core microprocessor with a custom AMD Radeon graphics core inside the processor package. The chip is intended for laptops that are thin and lightweight but powerful enough to run high-end videogames, the companies said. From a report: Executives from both AMD and Intel told PCWorld that the combined AMD-Intel chip will be an "evolution" of Intel's 8th-generation, H-series Core chips, with the ability to power-manage the entire module to preserve battery life. It's scheduled to ship as early as the first quarter of 2018. Though both companies helped engineer the new chip, this is Intel's project -- Intel first approached AMD, both companies confirmed. AMD, for its part, is treating the Radeon core as a single, semi-custom design, in the same vein as the chips it supplies to consoles like the Microsoft Xbox One X and Sony Playstation 4. Some specifics, though, remain undisclosed: Intel refers to it as a single product, though it seems possible that it could eventually be offered at a range of clock speeds. [...] Shaking hands on this partnership represents a rare moment of harmony in an often bitter rivalry that began when AMD reverse-engineered the Intel 8080 microchip in 1975.
What's next? Sonic on Nintendo consoles? Square-Enix games on computers?
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This is what Apple should use in future iPhones. A phone that runs an OS that is compatable with both macOS and iOS, that can connect to a keyboard and monitor and can be used as a PC in that way. They already working on that already and I wouldn't be surprised if some of Apple's money is quietly going towards AMD and Intel's new project.
If you think Apple is walking away from their own in-house A11 chip you're nuts. They've consistently out-performed all other ARM chips in single threaded performance, in their power envelope they're class leading while Intel has repeatedly tried, failed and eventually given up to sell a compelling phone chip. The question is rather when they decide the as-of-yet unreleased A11X tablet version is ready to go in a convertible/laptop form factor. The connectors are no problem, the phone already talks USB over lightning and the wireless streaming is the same only compressed and without a physical port. They probably have all the relevant bits merged to make an ARM laptop, though knowing Apple it'll probably be a walled garden.
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Putting aside AMD's very newest chip for a moment, there are basically three different kinds of use cases:
A) I want the best performance I can get within my $X budget.
B) it's a server serving many clients (lots of threads)
C) It's a single thread and I don't care how much it costs because I'm spending taxpayer money, I want the very fastest single-thread performance, cost be damned
Intel specializes in case C. Raw single-thread performance, cost be damned.
AMD will give you more cores for the dollar, so it competes well in case B, servers running many threads. AMD also traditionally costs significantly less, so it fits case A, getting the best CPU you can within a certain price range.
That's a generalization, though. It's best to compare one CPU model to another, evaluating based on the needs of your specific application and budget.
> I regretted that because I found that at that time in history while some code did run equally well on these that in general the software libraries for AMD just weren't tuned as well for these chips. Many optimizations not taken.
Part of that was do to Intel's shenanigans.
Intel's "cripple AMD" function in their compiler