For those that haven’t seen it, intel is releasing a new chipset that has an integrated AMD GPU on it; I am eager to see how the sales for that go. It does seem to imply that intel has given up on their own iGPU aspirations, which makes no sense given how much they’ve doubled-down on the GPU tech in recent years. But it may be just intel playing the long game to compete with nVidia, which is just killing it in the GPU department in recent years.
Well, to be fair, Intel HD graphics is a lot better than GMA. With Crystal Well, it's actually pretty close to something like a GTX 750 and outperforms even the new Vega APUs.
But this time they're actually making a play for the discrete graphics market. They've hired Raja Koduri and everything. Not the first time they've done that either (see: Larrabee) but they do look to be making a serious attempt.
They're not in the same performance class. A Crystalwell Iris Pro 580 (and the 2500U) are slightly slower than a GTX 750 non-Ti. The new Intel APU is going to be ballpark RX 570 performance - or something like a 1060 3 GB on the NVIDIA side. About 4x the performance - which is absolutely necessary for the sorts of applications Hades Canyon is aimed at, like VR.
Having a discrete graphics die, and especially having access to HBM2, makes a huge difference in performance. There isn't much you can do with 30 GB/s of bandwidth to share between CPU and GPU. Having Crystal Well L4 cache is a huge boost but it's still a halfassed fix compared to having proper VRAM available.
Of course, it's also a vastly more expensive part as well. Just the CPU+GPU package is more expensive than some of the 2500U laptops.
Presumably Intel is aiming for something more like Vega M GH with Jupiter Sound/Arctic Sound - it makes little sense to design a low-end discrete part with no room for future performance growth.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/kaby-lake-g-unveiled...