Cats and Dogs Living Together! - Intel Hades Canyon NUC with Radeon Graphics in 2022

Hey Geoff. I just saw your youtube video on this. And even made a post. Thought I would share what I know about this CPU/GPU combination. It never saw release because Intel and AMD struggled to get the CPU to properly switch to the GPU on certain applications. Essentially the cpu was supposed to have a built-in almost-mux switch. That would tell both your display and the application to, "Use the Vega GPU instead of the onboard Intel CPU". In practice, this was a pain in the a$$ controlling this with software. Essentially the intel-designed software would tell the system to switch between gpu's. Using the Intel CPU for lightweight tasks. And the AMD GPU for graphically intense tasks like GPU and CPU rendering. Think of it like the current Intel CPU's E/P core task scheduling. But for a GPU. The problem is neither Intel nor AMD could get this to work properly. With both GPU's running constantly. Think of it this way: You'd be using the Vega GPU. But instead of intel's GPU turned off, it would instead run in the background and wait for something to do. You have 2 GPU's running simultaneously. The Vega one is handling video rendering, the Intel one is handling 2D desktop graphics... And the software forgot what it was doing. Now your video is being rendered on the Intel GPU as well. While the AMD GPU is confused and awaiting instructions from Intel. You can actually see this happen in real time when you load up Task Manager. Or when an application like a game or photoshop begins to hitch and stutter for a few seconds. Credit were credit is due, it could have been far worse than it was. It actually does work fairly well in practice.... until you get to a laptop and realize 2 things: 1) It led to an incredibly loud and incredibly hot computer system that was not practical for a mobile device. In a laptop like the Dell XPS 9575 you could expect constant thermal throttling. As temps would constantly creep up to 90-100 degrees Celsius with a clean system and clean fans. 2) Battery life on these CPUs is abysmal. Even with Turbo-Boost turned off and the CPU+GPU downclocked I can only average 1 hour of battery life. We talk about range anxiety on a car, well how about range anxiety on a laptop. When you're worried that you won't last more than 50 minutes to an hour before the laptop dies. At this point I consider the batter just a UPS as opposed to an actual usable battery (and I've replaced it twice. Once from Dell, then again from a 3rd party shop because Dell doesn't make these batteries anymore). And, if you haven't guessed, I'm running a laptop with the exact same Processor as your Hades Canyon unit - the Dell XPS 9575. Edit - I honestly didn't expect Patreon to show the entire message.

Jecht