Contrary to how the article frames it, the play here is to starve Nvidia of oxygen by hitting their gaming business. Intel's biggest worry now is that they lose whole market segments to ARM-based systems with Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia has long had ambitions to own more of the platform, and there is a serious threat of them running away with the market by being the best at GPU performance and good enough everywhere else.

Intel has already made a move to rework their GPU development by effectively starting over(see: recruiting Raja Koduri to work in the same kind of leadership position he had at AMD previously while developing Vega). But they need a stopgap for the coming years, and this is one way to attack.

The Vega M package is a technically interesting product(size, integration, possible economies of scale), but it's primarily a win for market share because Intel can cram it down the throat of OEMs to stop them from using Nvidia. They would happily cut their margins to do so.

>They would happily cut their margins to do so.

Let hope they do.

Vega M GL/GH are a different die from Vega 56/64, if that's what you're implying here. It's smaller (yields decrease geometrically with size) and will be cheaper to produce, and Intel probably gets a reasonably good deal if they buy in bulk.

But yes, even still, Kaby-G is a very expensive part. I've heard ballpark like $500-600 for just the package. You can pretty much buy a whole Ryzen 2500U laptop for just that one item on the BOM. But it's also much faster - roughly 4x as fast as a 2500U.

Considering that Intel can pretty much raise the end price as much as they want and consumers will still make a bee line for it, I'd say Intels margin is secure here.

Customer, Could buy Intel Kaby + AMD GPU separately. So no, Intel' margin is not secure.