Back in 2018, Intel and AMD surprised the tech world and released Kaby Lake-G; an 8th generation Intel Core i7 CPU integrated with an AMD-powered Radeon RX Vega M discrete GPU. Now, near a couple of years later and with no further driver updates from Intel, AMD seems to be pulling driver support for the GPU portion of the chip.
According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, those with a laptop running the Kaby Lake-G processor and are trying to update the Vega M GPU will be met by an error message. Informing users that the “AMD graphics hardware” in the system is not supported in the software installation.
News of AMD’s decision reportedly comes three months after its “frenemy”, Intel, comes several months after Intel ceased any driver support for the CPU. The timing and execution, dare we say, isn’t looking great, for owners with laptops running on Kaby Lake-G, but isn’t terribly unexpected; back in 2019, Intel decided to officially end support for Kaby Lake-G processor. And shift both its focus and resources towards the development of its own Xe graphics architecture.
To-date, less than a handful of notebooks from that time are equipped with Intel’s Kaby Lake-G. This includes the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1, the Intel NUC 8 Extreme, and the HP Spectre x360. On another note, Intel did tell Tom’s Hardware that it was working on bringing back Radeon graphics support, but only to its NUC 8 Extreme mini PCs.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, Hot Hardware)
