It seems to largely be a cost issue, since AMD does not exactly have huge amounts of cash to pour into lots of different chips designs for specific purposes lik

It seems to largely be a cost issue, since AMD does not exactly have huge amounts of cash to pour into lots of different chips designs for specific purposes like Intel. AMD wanted to release 8 core parts that competed on price with Intel's 4 core parts. Roughly half the die area (and thus manufacturing cost) of Intel's quad core desktop CPUs is the GPU, so by cutting the GPU they were able to make 8 cores at similar cost to Intel's 4 cores + GPU. It also allowed them to reuse the same chip for desktop, workstation, and server parts dramatically reducing R&D costs for the whole lineup. And really "high end" Intel processors, as in everything with 8 cores or more, also lack the GPU anyway. The Raven Ridge CPUs are 4 cores + GPU (with much faster GPU than anything Intel has). I imagine they'll do a higher core count part with GPU once Globalfoundries starts making 7nm chips.