According to a report in PC World, Intel has asked AMD for access to the Mantle API. Both companies have also confirmed this, according to the report.

"I know that Intel [has] approached us for access to the Mantle interfaces, et cetera. And right now, we've said, give us a month or two, this is a closed beta. And we'll go into the 1.0 [public release] phase sometime this year, which is less than five months if you count forward from June. They have asked for access, and we will give it to them when we open this up, and we'll give it to anyone who wants to participate in this," said Richard Huddy from AMD.

The exact motives behind Intel wanting access to the Mantle API are unclear, but given that the Mantle API allows developers to code games to run a lot more efficiently, along with the fact that Intel's GPUs aren't very powerful, it would benefit Intel to have Mantle support on its GPUs. This is because it will give the Intel GPUs a bit more gaming power, and while it won't make the GPUs perform on par with high-end GPUs, it will certainly make a number of previously unplayable games playable on the iGPUs. According to Intel, this is for an experiment, and DirectX12 remains its primary focus.

"At the time of the initial Mantle announcement, we were already investigating rendering overhead based on game developer feedback. Our hope was to build consensus on potential approaches to reduce overhead with additional data. We have publicly asked them to share the spec with us several times as part of examination of potential ways to improve APIs and increase efficiencies. At this point though we believe that DirectX 12 and ongoing work with other industry bodies and OS vendors will address the issues that game developers have noted," an Intel Spokesperson told PC World.

Mind you though, this should be treated as a rumor for the time being, as only PC World has verified the information. Despite that, it's nice to see things the other way around for a change: AMD having something that Intel wants.

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