Sapphire Starts Building Compact AMD Embedded Solutions
Sapphire is starting to make small, embedded PCs.
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!
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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xiinc37 Hmmm.... that board looks like it doesn't actually have an APU on it. Am I missing something?Reply -
iam2thecrowe 12821880 said:Hmmm.... that board looks like it doesn't actually have an APU on it. Am I missing something?
i thought exactly the same thing. -
Haravikk Hmmm.... that board looks like it doesn't actually have an APU on it. Am I missing something?
Maybe it's on the other side? At that size the board is pretty cramped after all.I'm very interested in these though; while Intel NUCs may be a bit more capable overall, they're very expensive for what you're getting. I've always liked AMD's APUs for the performance they give for the price, as I'd really love to get myself a tiny lightweight gaming machine, as I've never been too bothered about getting the latest games straight away. -
lazacom Almost 100% on other side. I see 4 holes for mounting tiny cooler in middle of board and some capacitors and resistors in middle of that, which are needed by APU.Reply -
Onus It also needs to include a couple of SATA ports, otherwise it will be limited to kiosks and other limited-function devices. Based on the performance of the A4-5000 in my new Thinkpad X140E though, this could be a very competent little box for many uses, even up to older or less demanding games. Hopefully the price will be right, and it will have those SATA ports.Reply -
tabascosauz Embedded stuff like AMD's new E8860 sound great for entry-level gaming, but what's the point if we're only going to get A4 or even inferior performance on the CPU side?Reply -
gallidorn Maybe I missed it, but it seems like they intentionally skipped over what type of CPU will be used. I like everything they are trying to fit on a 4" x 4" motherboard, but CPU specs are more important than what Graphics chip it uses. If you have Radeon HD 8000 series graphics with a single 1GHz CPU... you will have a computer that doesn't do much, but looks good doing it!!!Reply