Next-generation Vulkan API could be Valve’s killer advantage in battling Microsoft... look at that CPU usage graph.

No, this is a good thing. Valve's Vulkan support on the Intel GPU is intended to be open-source and to be the basis for other manufacturers (beyond just AMD and Nvidia) to implement their support for Vulkan. That's more the basis of why Valve actually went ahead and implemented support on the open-source Linux drivers for Intel. In this case, Intel has generally had the best Linux drivers - moreso that they are more or less freely open and it has generally been easy to contribute to it compared to, say, Nvidia's GPUs.

Everything about AMD's goals of Mantle can be achieved with Vulkan, and I (as someone who currently happens to own an Intel/Nvidia computer) think it's admirable that AMD was able to contribute their work into Khronos's project, the consortium in which AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Valve, etc. are part of, and who are working on the Vulkan project.

AMD stated they wanted a low-level API which takes the load off the CPU. Done.

AMD stated that they wanted the API to go on OS X and Linux and not just Windows. Done.

They wanted it to run on Nvidia and Intel GPUs. We definitely have the latter. As for the former? Seems to be happening. Nvidia's support of OpenGL has historically been very good.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2015/03/03/vulkan-api/1

But as the article states, this is really in Valve's interest in particular, as this could be the API that helps them compete against Microsoft. They were also working with the likes of DICE (mind you, this is the same DICE which was one of the pioneers of Mantle) or Epic. Intel being part of it doesn't mean anything at all. They're part of it because they too are part of the Khronos Group consortium.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/khronos-group-vulkan-graphics-api,28678.html

It works out because much of the work to actually get it running on Linux didn't have to be done by AMD. Moreover, you now have had much more feedback who worked on this project, and so even if the final API isn't fully Mantle 1.0, that's no issue. Gone are the days where skeptics of the new API used to be able to say something like, "this can only run on a GCN GPU."

The only real loser if this project takes off, really, is Microsoft.

/r/Amd Thread Parent Link - extremetech.com