After decades of fierce rivalry and bitter lawsuits, you'd be forgiven for thinking it would be a cold day in hell before Intel and AMD would team-up to produce a brand new kind of product, but here we are with Hades Canyon - a unique melding of Intel processor and AMD graphics technology. The NUC8i7HVK here is the top-end configuration, and the latest in a long line of ultra small form-factor PCs from Intel, the difference here being that alongside the quad-core, octo-thread Core i7 processor we have Radeon Vega graphics - a semi-custom design AMD has provided for Chipzilla. It's a cutting-edge piece of kit, but just how powerful is it?
First things first. While this is by far and away the fastest integrated graphics solution ever put out into the market, it shouldn't be compared with AMD's own Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G, each with their own integrated Vega GPU. AMD's processor is incorporated onto the chip die itself, sharing space - and memory bandwidth - with the x86 cores. It's a small, tight, all-in-one budget design.
The new Intel Kaby Lake G set-up is different: it's a premium piece of kit compromising of a four-core, eight-thread Intel processor like the many desktop Core i7s before it, sitting on what Intel calls an embedded multi-die interconnect bridge, which hooks up an entirely separate GPU chip to the CPU via eight PCI Express lanes. There's no memory contention or bandwidth limitations for the GPU as there is in the Ryzen APUs (where graphics run from the same system RAM as the CPU) and that's because 4GB of dedicated HBM2 is directly attached to the Radeon graphics core.
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