HP announces Spectre 15 X360 with Kaby Lake, RX Vega M

These will also end up mostly in SFFs like the 2-in-1s, thin and light notebooks, and mini PCs, like the newly announced Intel Hades Canyon NUC. G-Series chips all have onboard RX Vega M GPUs, while true H-Series chips will be exclusively Intel CPUs, leaving manufacturers free to pair them up with any discrete GPU.

From new login options to the inclusion of your choice of higher-power graphics solutions mixed with long-standing connectivity offerings, HP is straddling the line between modernity and legacy. They’ll hit the market starting this spring.

Intel didn’t reveal details on pricing, but said that consumers can look out for the chip in systems from OEM partners in the first half of 2018.

All five of the Core Radeon processors have four cores with eight threads. The four Core i7 parts get a 3.1GHz base frequency and 8MB of cache, while these drop to 2.8GHz and 6MB on the sole Core i5 SKU. There will be i5 and i7 models for the chips and comes with 65 watts and 100 watts variant which the latter is unlocked and overclockable. The GPU and VRAM then communicate with the CPU over a x8 PCIe 3.0 interface within the processor. Clock speeds for both the core and the 4GB HBM2 frame buffer are higher on the GH chip too. The GH models have a TDP of 100W and the GL models have a TDP of 65W. Geared towards gamers, content creators, and graphics-intensive applications, this new processor powers Intel’s new NUC, making it the world’s smallest VR-capable computer.

The latest launch of G-series shows that Intel is taking more interest in pushing into the gaming segment where it lags behind NVIDIA and AMD. The first runs the 8th Gen Intel Core i7 8705G processor with Radeon RX Vega M graphics, giving the Spectre x360 15 a reported 12-hour battery life. The Spectre x360 15 is also a bit heavier, at 4.62 pounds for the Nvidia version and 4.72 pounds for the AMD version (compared to the previous models 4.4 pounds).

Being a convertible PC, you can use it as a normal laptop, or flip the screen round to morph into a stand mode, or use it as a tablet instead. Intel traditionally pairs its CPUs with discrete GPUs from Nvidia, but with Radeon Intel now offers processors that come with the CPU and GPU on the same silicon.

The integrated GPUs feature support for 4K displays and other features like Intel Quick Sync Video.

Max-Q design was launched a year ago, and like Intel’s new G-series chip it was meant to make gaming laptops thinner, quieter, and cooler without significantly compromising speed (battery life proved to still be pretty terrible).

The AMD Radeon RX Vega M GL ships with 20 compute units with 1280 stream processors clocked at 931MHz.

Intel’s AMD partnership will show up in a few laptops, and we’ll no doubt hear about them in the next day or two at CES, but they’ll also appear in one of Intel’s NUC systems, the company’s “Next Unit of Computing” built to make computers both very small and very powerful. The HP Z 3D camera will be made available in the U.S. in March 2018 at a price of $599 (roughly Rs. 38,000).