Sapphire has announced that it has started its entry into a new market – the embedded PC market. This is run by the company's new Embedded Systems Business Unit, and while the company gave no clear word on what its first unit would be, we do have specifications and an image.
The unit that was shown in the press release appears to be the BP-FT3. This unit is a very compact motherboard, which looks remarkably like Intel's NUC systems. Why do we say that they look like them? Well, it looks like they will be carrying AMD's G-Series APUs rather than ULV Intel CPUs.
"AMD and Sapphire have a long history of working closely together to deliver leading-edge graphics solutions, and we are excited for Sapphire to join AMD's embedded partner ecosystem," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Embedded Solutions. "We look forward to seeing AMD based solutions from Sapphire to address the embedded market."
The units will have support for up to 16 GB of DDR3-SODIMM memory, as well as a single half-length Mini-PCIe device, along with a full-size mSATA device. The onboard APU will carry an AMD Radeon HD 8000 series GPU and address two HDMI 1.4a ports. Also aboard are two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, along with Gigabit Ethernet. All of this comes in a board with the same 4 x 4 inch format as Intel NUC systems.
The company gave no word on when we would start seeing these units on shelves or what they would cost, but we can only hope it will be soon!
