Rivals AMD and Intel are teaming up on a new chip for PC gaming laptops that'll try to take on Nvidia in the graphics arena.
The product will pack an Intel Core H-series processor with a graphics chip from AMD's Radeon group to boost performance on gaming laptops while retaining thin and light designs, Intel said on Monday.
Current laptops running Intel's Core H-series tend to be around 26mm or just over an inch thick, Intel said. They also tend to use a separate graphics card, which both Nvidia and AMD sell. Intel's new chip, however, intends to help laptop makers miniaturize the internals even further, by packing an Intel CPU and AMD GPU into one slim, power-efficient package.
Monday's partnership might sound odd, given that AMD and Intel have been competitors for years in the PC chip industry. "I almost fell off my chair when I heard about this," Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights, wrote in a post on Forbes. However, Intel has actually always had a "good relationship" with AMD's Radeon group, which develops discrete graphics cards used in many Intel-powered PCs, according to Moorhead.
In recent years, Nvidia has also become a bigger threat to Intel over selling its chips to the datacenter machine-learning market. "The enemy of my bigger enemy is my friend, right?" Moorhead added.
For now, Intel and AMD aren't giving technical details behind the new chip, like how fast the cores on it will run. But to connect the different processor parts together, the chip relies on an Intel technology called Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge or EMIB.
That bridge helps reduce the size of the laptop's motherboard, keeping the system compact.
The upcoming chip will be part of Intel's 8th-generation Intel Core family and will start shipping in next year's first quarter to laptop vendors.