AMD is well settled in the high-volume embedded market that addresses the needs of digital signage, casino gaming, point-of-sale systems, and kiosks with low-cost processors. The company already offers embedded versions of Opteron, Athlon, Athlon X2, Turion II Neo and Athlon II Neo, Sempron, Geode and G-series processors. However, the R-series is the first AMD product to offer an embedded version of an APU with integrated graphics that could attract customers due to a favorable cost proposition.
"AMD pioneered the embedded APU to offer our customers a high-performance, power-efficient, small form-factor embedded processor," said AMD's Buddy Broeker in a prepared statement. "With the AMD Embedded R-Series, we are taking our APU technology to the next level. By leveraging its seamlessly integrated heterogeneous system architecture, developers can tap into a high-performance and efficient parallel processing engine to accelerate their graphics- and compute-intensive applications, all while using industry-standard libraries such as OpenCL and DirectCompute."
According to AMD, the dual- and quad-core R-series is rated at a TDP of 17 to 35 watts and comes with a video compression engine that includes a dedicated hardware encoder, secure asset management, as well as enhancements to the Unified Video Decoder that enable the R-series to decode HD as well as 3D video. The APUs support up to four displays simultaneously, can run display resolutions of up to 4K by 2k at 30 fps, and can power up to ten separate displays when combined with a Radeon Embedded 6000 series graphics card.
The APUs are offered in eight versions ranging from the 1.9 GHz, dual-core R-252F (17 watt) to the 2.3 GHz, quad-core R-464L (35 watt). All APUs will become available during Q2.
