At this year’s Design West Conference, AMD announced its new Embedded G-Series System-on-Chip (SoC) platform which is based on its next generation “Jaguar” CPU architecture. It integrates an embedded Radeon HD 8000 series GPU, a combination that the company views as setting a “new bar for SoC design” and “further signifies a strategic push to focus on high-growth markets outside the PC industry.”
The platform has full support for DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.2x and OpenCL 1.2 and reportedly offers spectacular performance given its low TDP, die size and overall footprint. Specifically, AMD says that the G-Series SoC offers up to 113 percent improved CPU performance and 120 percent improved GPU performance over the prior generation of G-Series APUs, and more significantly, a 125 percent and 500 percent advantage over the Intel Atom when running “multiple industry-standard” compute and graphics-intensive benchmarks.
AMD will initially be releasing five low-power x86 SKUs that all have ECC memory support, industrial temperature range of -40°C to 85°C, an I/O controller, and are priced between $49 and $72.
| Name | GX-210HA | GX-217GA | GX-415GA | GX-416RA | GX-420CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cores | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| CPU Clock | 1.0 GHz | 1.65 GHz | 1.5 GHz | 1.6 GHz | 2.0 GHz |
| TDP | 9 W | 15 W | 15 W | 15 W | 25 W |
| iGPU | HD 8210E | HD 8280E | HD 8330E | None | HD 8400E |
| iGPU Clock | 300 MHz | 500 MHz | 500 MHz | - | 600 MHz |
“We have built a treasure trove of industry-leading IP in processors, graphics and multimedia along with the infrastructure to combine these building blocks into unsurpassed embedded SOC solutions,” said Arun Iyengar, vice president and general manager, AMD Embedded Solutions. “With a 33 percent smaller footprint, low power consumption and exceptional performance, the new AMD Embedded G-Series SoC sets the bar for content-rich multimedia and traditional workload processing that is ideal for a broad variety of embedded applications.”
The platform supports Windows Embedded 8 and Linux and is designed for a wide array of embedded applications such as industrial control, digital signage, electronic gaming systems, SMB storage, IP-TV, medical and network appliances, and set-top boxes.
The AMD Embedded G-Series SoC is scheduled for general availability in Q2 2013, which is expected to be followed by a “comprehensive ecosystem of industry-leading embedded solution providers supporting and/or announcing market-ready products” powered by the platform.