Intel’s Kaby Lake-G lineup was one of the more bizarre products the chipmaker has designed over the years. Pairing the Skylake CPU architecture with AMD’s Vega graphics architecture, along with on-package HBM memory, it was a one-of-a-kind APU. Unfortunately, AMD announced the discontinuation of driver support for the latter last year (just two years after launch), and ever since, the fate of the hybrid has been in limbo.
Intel moderator Bryce has notified the community that a new driver for Kaby Lake-G would be released sometime in mid-July, but that date is long past. Fortunately, Bryce was nice enough to provide an update. According to him, the driver team is still hard at work, and the driver has already been sent over from AMD’s side and is undergoing final validation and testing.
An Intel employee (Arlyn_B) has provided yet another update: It looks like the Kaby Lake-G lineup will be compatible with Window 11 as well. Being part of the 8th Gen lineup, it wasn’t clear whether it’d make the cut as all Intel processors older than Kaby Lake aren’t officially compatible.Â
This means that the few people who actually bought Kaby Lake-G won’t be left behind. This should ensure support for at least another couple of years. The Kaby Lake-G lineup includes the Core i7-8705G, i7-8706G, i7-8709G, i7-8809G, and i5-8305G. The Radeon Vega M GPU is connected to the CPU via Intel’s EMIB interconnect, offering a memory bandwidth of up to 204.8 GB/s. The GPU features up to 24 CUs (1,536 stream processors) and a GPU boost clock of up to 1,190 MHz. In addition to the Vega graphics, an onboard integrated UHD 630 graphics solution is also available on the processors.Â
