AMD G-Series APUs Powering a Real-time Operating System
AMD Is Now Partenering With A Leader In RTOS Software
Since the release of AMD’s “APU”, or Accelerated Processing Unit, it has been applied to a multitude of applications from low powered media PCs to budget gaming PCs. A new application is being formed now which is integrating the APU platform into RTOS software.
RTOS stands for Real Time Operating System which is a form of an OS which is said to be far more consistent when compared to a general purpose OS such as Windows. This consistency reduces “jitter” and time between I/O operations. RTOSs are applied in situations where timing and latencies are essential. An example of this could be web server where timings must be consistent to server consistent data.
Recently, Green Hills Software, the largest independent vendor of embedded software has teamed up with AMD to embed its INTEGRITY RTOS technology into AMD APUs. This solution is fantastic for many applications that require a low-power yet high reliability in a system. This could mean in the future we may see AMD APUs powering servers with far higher efficiency than we see today.
“The INTEGRITY board support package for the AMD Embedded G-Series APU supports the AMD DB-FT1 Development Board and will enable AMD customers to build a strong software foundation based on market proven Green Hills technology,” says Chris Smith, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. “With its advanced separation kernel architecture, INTEGRITY has achieved numerous certifications for industry safety and security standards, leading to its widespread adoption in the embedded market.”

RTOS is used when the execution time of all programs must be predictable for consistent and reliable I/O monitoring. This includes pretty much all medical devices, military devices and Geo-spatial (satellites / ect..) devices. There are others like your car's computer, not the GPS or media player but the ECU which regulates your engine.
Anything that has limited tasks running and absolutely CAN NOT FAIL.
You and that other fool yesterday doing the same thing now has me saying in my head< "Nice article!" every time I read one!
"An example of this could be an autopilot system for an automobile, in which output control signals must be generated with a consistent frequency and adhering to a latency maximum. The parallel floating-point processing power of the APU facilitates real-time processing of video and radar inputs to provide the system with a virtual model of the physical environment, and the real-time operating system ensures that steering, throttle and brake control signals do not suffer from latencies induced by process switching, memory refresh cycles, hard disk access times, software interrupts, and other unpredictable events that could otherwise occupy one or more cores for several milliseconds."
Long ago (in a galaxy not so far away) I worked at a factory equipment manufacturer. This equipment had to respond to one particular input within 0.2 milliseconds or the equipment would not work properly for the intended purpose. The original design they employed to control a high-performance stepper motor was a custom-designed PCB with a combination of analog and digital circuits, user input controls, and output amplifiers. They tried to replace this design with a computer-controlled stepper motor that used a proprietary operating system, programming language, and set of control signals in the hopes of reducing materials and assembly costs. The problem was that this "improvement" randomly introduced up to a 20 msec delay into the response times for that critical event. In practice, about one out of every 10 or so (randomly seelcted) responses were delayed by up to 20 milliseconds. This effect was caused by a poorly-written hardware interrupt handler in that proprietary operating system. The new device was useless for the intended application, because it was not a real-time operating system.
Yeah, no one likes misfiring engine. In the 1970's, there was a car company that attempted to use a computer-controlled automatic transmission to improve fuel efficiency by 5%-15%.
The problem was that the microprocessor chip was too weak to handle the data load. That kneecapped the engines severely.
umm....niche stuff is where real work happens. Things that are a lot bigger than consumer rubbish. For example, AMD chips power controllers for high volume, high relieability Oce digital production 320 ppm printers.