I always thought it was a bit hard to figure out who Intel was going after with the 5775C other than someone wanting an NUC style build. With i7's typically going into workstations or gaming towers, they are mostly paired with GPU's anyways. From the little that I had read on gaming workloads, the huge cache didn't add much performance if any when running with discreet cards over something like Devils Canyon. I'm only guessing that there are more professional software cases where it was able to exploit that L4 with good results. As nice of a cpu as it was, it seems like it didn't have any particular market to target, which perhaps lead to Iris Pro's quick demise.

Being reminded of this just makes me think about how badly I want AMD to come out with a powerhouse APU with at least 8 zen 2 cpu cores, at least 4gb of embedded HMB2(E) and enough CUs to game at 1080p ultra @60fps (though 1440p would be amazing). I wouldn't care if it required an TR4 socket and 250watts, because the ability to completely wash my hands of the dGPU market would be just sheer joy. If AMD could somehow, make a 4-6 CPU core APU with enough GPU horsepower to do 1080p ultra at 60fps (again, embedded 4gb of HBM2e would be essential) and keep the tdp down to approximately 140watts or less (i7-9750h - 45w + RTX 2060 - 90w = 135watts) it'd be a game changer.

Question remains... game changer for who? The price would be the real indicator here, because lots of people won't mind dGPU at all if the combo can be had cheaper. That and they also have the ability to upgrade it separately, which, for gaming, should not be understated especially with the CPU performance curve being nearly flat.Coming back to my 5775C remark... people replied- where's the market? They're probably right. I mean the A10 wasn't killing anything either. AMD would need some sort of campaign of 'Ultrabook' like proportions to get people accustomed to a new norm, form factor and function combo.

Combining a CPU with a powerful enough GPU+VMEM is not easy (Enough being jumping from movies and indie games to full on 1080P gaming). The Hades Canyon NUC is truly one of a kind in terms of raw power per MCM size. This HBM2 package does wonders.



To "Why not a stronger 5775C?" Intel answers with "eDRAM is too expensive" and ill add that they can't make it over 128MB at the moment without being gigantic to a point where you better just use HBM2.



For NUC-like solutions, HBM2e has to be the ultimate solution for power to size ratio, but its painfully expensive to use. That's one of the reasons this NUC is so expensive.



You do get the performance of something like a GTX 1650, which is very nice. The question is - what is your target audience? Will you be aiming towards budget oriented gamers? No, That's why you have CPUs like 9100F \ Ryzen 3 of kinds and GPUs like Radeon RX 5500.



That narrows it to a very niche type of audience that want to have power in a very small form factor, smaller than even what MITX cases can offer. I'm not sure AMD \ Intel are truly after this market, and pretty sure Hades Canyon NUC so far has not been making billions for those both.



The natural curve of APUs will have to keep bending to available DDR speeds of standard platforms, as slow as they may be (and they are, cripplingly slow).