Intel retires Kaby Lake-G with AMD Radeon GPU

Intel puts end-of-life status on the entire Kaby Lake G family of processors for laptops. As of January 31, 2020, the company will no longer be taking orders for the processors with Intel CPU and AMD Radeon GPU.

Intel has notified its partner companies of the end-of-life statement for Kaby Lake-G with a Product Change Notification PDF. It concerns all chips in the series: the Intel Core i7-8706G, i7-8705G, i7-8809G, i7-8709G, i7-8706G and i5-8305G. Companies can place orders for the chips until January 31, 2020. Intel will then deliver until July 31 at the latest.

This brings an end to a short and remarkable collaboration between Intel and AMD. Intel announced the Kaby Lake-G in early 2018. These are chips that consist of one with Intel quad-core including integrated Intel HD 630 GPU and one with AMD RX Vega GPU. The two dies are connected via an embedded multi-die interconnect bridge.

The collaboration was not very successful. In practice, the Kaby Lake-G chips appeared in only a few laptops. As a reason for the shutdown, Intel now reports that demand has shifted to ‘other Intel products’. Intel is working hard to design more powerful GPUs for its processors itself and has hired former AMD employees for this. For example, some recently announced Ice Lake processors have integrated Iris Plus GPUs with up to 64 execution units and the Xe architecture for GPUs with up to 512 execution units for separate video cards should be ready next year.