When Intel Kaby Lake-G processors were unveiled in 2018, many of us were surprised – pleasantly so – due to its unique collaboration with AMD, which provided the graphics power for Intel’s CPU. However, that rare teaming up of the old rivals seems to have finally fallen apart with AMD apparently ending driver support for Kaby Lake-G processors.
Intel itself discontinued the processors back in October 2019, leaving AMD to continue to issue drivers for the integrated graphics while it focused on its newer products – including its upcoming Intel Xe discrete GPUs.
Driver support for Kaby Lake-G processors has been pretty patchy in the past – with the chips going a full 12 months without a single update – even though Intel promised five years of driver support.
Ceding updates to AMD brought hope to Kaby Lake-G owners, as they began getting updates through AMD’s Adrenalin 2020 package, which brought security fixes and performance improvements.
However, it now seems that will come to an end.
No more updates
While there hasn’t been an official statement from AMD (or Intel), users with Kaby Lake-G processors have found they couldn’t install the latest WDDM 2.7 driver (20.5.1) and WHQL (20.4.2) drivers.
What’s particularly galling for Kaby Lake-G owners is that it appears they are once again being locked out of the latest drivers, and this seems to include AMD’s latest enhanced drivers that the company released for the new Windows 10 May 2020 Update.
Our colleagues over at Tom’s Hardware tried to install the new drivers on their Hades Canyon NUC mini PC, and encountered an error message saying the hardware was not supported.
We’ve contacted AMD to find out more about this, but for the moment it seems like support for Kaby Lake-G is now at an end – and so it is that rare collaboration between Intel and AMD.