In 2020 though many laptops were released there were pretty limited options in terms of having a laptop with a powerful discrete graphical processor. The OEMs were expected to release a laptop coupled with a powerful CPU and discrete GPU but what we got were a bunch of machines coming out with underperforming intel processors and the underachieving GeForce RTX 2060.
But the PC experts have been wondering that with the availability of AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series CPU powered laptops, the availability of the limited graphic of the notebooks was surprising. But the folks at PurePC.pl have done some digging and are now claiming that Intel and Nvidia appear to somehow be responsible for the limited dGPU options on last year’s Ryzen 4000 laptops.
Laptop OEMs have indicated that the Renoir platform featured only 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes for the graphics side, which apparently would hinder the potential of higher-end dGPU models. but the fact was white-washed as in 2021 Ryzen 5000 laptops still feature the same 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes but comes coupled with up to an RTX 3080 high-end GPU.
The investigations conducted by the Polish team led them to believe that the explanations regarding the limited number of lanes on the Renoir-based laptops were nothing more than a “smokescreen.” But according to sources, one OEM which is to be unnamed came forward and secretly acknowledged that the actual reason for those limitations was an internal agreement between Intel and Nvidia. According to the agreement, only the top Comet Lake-H CPUs were to be coupled with high-end NVIDIA GPUs. It is dirty intel.
However, there is still no solid proof that there was ever an agreement between the blue team and the green team. But it would not be surprising since Intel has been known to incentivize its partners to delay or even exclude AMD’s solutions for certain form-factors. But this year it seems that the OEMs are betting on AMD.
