The new chips will complement the G-Series products rolled out last year, and will target such devices as medical, video conferencing and retail systems.
Advanced Micro Devices officials are
bringing their new Trinity chip offerings to embedded systems.
The company on May 21 announced the
Embedded R-Series accelerated processing units (APUs), based on the Trinity
chips introduced earlier this month. The new Trinity APUs, which offer
integrated x86 CPUs and discrete-level graphics capabilities, are the second
generation of the APU push that AMD first introduced in January 2011.
Up to eight APUs will be offered in
the Embedded R-Series lineup, with the chips offering as many as four chip
cores and 384 graphics cores. The chip cores will be based on AMDs latest
Piledriver core architecture.
The APUs also will carry AMDs
Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics chips, which support DirectX 11 for improved
multimedia capabilities. Some versions of the chip come with PCI Express Gen 2
support.
"AMD pioneered the embedded APU
to offer our customers a high-performance, power-efficient, small-form-factor
embedded processor," Buddy Broeker, director of AMDs Embedded Solutions
unit, said in a statement. "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."
AMD officials have outlined a host
of areas that can leverage the new embedded chips, from smart cameras and
medical systems, to video conferencing, digital signage and point-of-sale
machines.
In a May 21 post on AMDs blog site, Cameron Swen,
manager of embedded marketing at AMD, said the new Series-R chips help system
designers solve the issues of power consumption when trying to ramp up
performance.
New processing solutions based on
heterogeneous architectures are emerging that enable low-power designers to
significantly increase their system performance without adding significant cost
or power to the system, Swen wrote. Heterogeneous processing itself isnt
new, but what makes these solutions different are the open and royalty-free
programming standards for general-purpose computations on heterogeneous systems
that are developing around them, such as OpenCL. Using standards like OpenCL
helps programmers preserve their expensive source-code investment and easily target
and port code between multi-core CPUs, GPUs and new APUs, which combine both
x86 processing cores and graphics-processing units on a single die.
AMD last year launched the Embedded G-Series platform, which offers power
envelopes of 5.5 to 18 watts, addresses the needs of very low-power
applications, he said. In comparison, the new Embedded R-Series consume 17 to
35 watts, a good complement to the G-Series, Swen wrote.
So now there are more options
available to help you find that ideal balance between performance and power
consumption, he wrote.
AMD announced that a number of
system makersincluding Advantech-Innocore, Axiomtek, Congatec, iBase, Quixant
and iBasehave said they will use the new R-Series in their systems.
AMD officials are aggressively
ramping up their second-generation APUs, having unveiled on May 15 the new Trinity A-Series chips aimed at notebooks,
ultrathin laptops and desktops.
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