On Wednesday, AMD announced the AMD Embedded G-Series System-on-Chip (SOC), its latest solution that combines the power of the x86 CPU, advanced Radeon GPU and I/O controller all-in-one into one device. Benchmark results showed a 113 percent improved CPU performance compared to the preceding AMD Embedded G-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). AMD made the announcement Tuesday at the 2013 DESIGN West expo among the world's top product developers and electronic design engineers.
Embedded systems are becoming more prevalent in the lives of consumers and are used in smart TVs and set-top boxes. Single-chip SOC platforms help to further develop the growth of computing by offering processors that are compact in size. Energy-efficiency and high performance are also must have features for interactive computing, or what's known as "Surround Computing." The term refers to the move towards advanced technology, where device interaction and computing becomes second nature and seamless. The new family of AMD Embedded G-Series SOC offers high performance and works to reduce power consumption.
"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. 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," Vice President and General Manager of AMD Embedded Solutions, Arun Iyengar said in a press release.
The AMD Embedded G-Series SOC is designed for embedded applications such as digital displays, gaming systems, medical and network appliances, and set-top boxes. It's based on the AMD next-gen "Jaguar" CPU architecture and AMD Radeon 8000 Series graphics. The "Jaguar" CPU is also built into the upcoming Playstation 4 (PS4) gaming system, which will feature eight x86-64 AMD "Jaguar" CPU cores.
AMD expects to ship the new SOC platform in the second quarter of 2013 with support for Windows Embedded 8 and Linux.
Some key features of the new processor family include:
- enterprise-class Error-Correction Code (ECC) memory support;
- industrial temperature range of -40°C to +85°C and available with dual or quad-core CPUs;
- discrete-class AMD Radeon GPU;
- I/O controller.
