AMD announces G-Series x86 SoCs to compete in smart devices market
AMD was hit hard and kept slowly moving in a downward spiral ever since Intel came out with Core microarchitecture and the recent onslaught from tablets on PC market has weakened their prospects further. It is well known that AMD has been working on entering embedded SoC market and today, AMD has announced a new SoC architecture based on x86. AMD has also announced that they will be ready with ARM architecture based SoCs for smartphones and other smart devices. The first in the line of new series is ‘G Series SoC’.
“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 4, 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.”
AMD Embedded G-series SoC (System-on-Chip) is based on Jaguar CPU architecture and AMD Radeon™ 8000 Series graphics and will be have option for dual-core and quad-core CPUs. When compared to G series APU, the new Soc can offer 113% performance improvements and is also 125% faster then Intel Atom SoC. G-series supports DirectX® 11.1, OpenGL 4.2x and OpenCL™ 1.22 and operates between 9W and 25W power window with industrial temperature range of -40°C to +85°C.
“As the Internet of Things permeates every aspect of our life from work to home and everything where in-between, devices require high performance, I/O connectivity, and energy efficiency in smaller packages,” said Colin Barnden, principal analyst, Semicast Research. “With this new AMD SOC design, the AMD Embedded G-Series platform offers the perfect mix of high performance, a small footprint, low-energy use, and full I/O integration to enable smaller form factor embedded designs, cool and efficient operation, and simplified build requirements. AMD has leapfrogged the competition by combining the power of an X86 CPU, and the performance of AMD Radeon graphics with the I/O interconnect all on a single die.”
List of models available at launch:
- GX-420CA SOC with AMD Radeon™ HD 8400E Graphics
- Quad-core, 25W TDP, CPU freq. 2.0GHz, GPU freq. 600MHz
- GX-415GA SOC with AMD Radeon™ HD 8330E Graphics
- Quad-core, 15W TDP, CPU freq. 1.50GHz, GPU freq. 500MHz
- GX-217GA SOC with AMD Radeon™ HD 8280E Graphics
- Dual-core, 15W TDP, CPU freq. 1.65GHz, GPU freq. 450MHz
- GX-210HA SOC with AMD Radeon™ HD 8210E Graphics
- Dual-core, 9W TDP, CPU freq. 1.0GHz, GPU freq. 300MHz
- GX-416RA SOC
- Quad-Core, 15W, CPU Freq. 1.6GHz, No GPU
Listed below is the full features list of the series:
Developer Support and Product Features:
Developers working with the AMD Embedded G-Series SOC can implement remote management, virtualization and security capabilities to help reduce deployment costs and increase security and reliability of their AMD Embedded G-Series SOC-based platform through:
- AMD DAS 1.0 featuring DASH 1.1
- AMD Virtualization™ technology
- Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 support
Next-generation CPU core
- Next-generation “Jaguar” core with innovative, new shared L2 Cache
- Enterprise-class feature of ECC and fast memory support
Excellent AMD Radeon™ graphics performance per watt
- Enhanced Universal Video Decode (UVD) 3 hardware acceleration (H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 etc.) and new video encode capability not available in previous AMD Embedded G-Series APU
- Power efficiency enhancement with clock gating to contribute to overall lower power consumption
Advanced GPU enables parallel processing and high-performance graphics
- Heterogeneous computing for industrial control and automation, communications and other processor heavy applications: OpenCL enables CPU and GPU parallel processing, which benefits applications development in these areas
- Graphics (DirectX 11, OpenGL) and dual independent display; high-resolution support for a superb visual experience
- Expands software development options and extends application lifetime with advanced graphics APIs
Ideal platform for low-power and high-performance designs
- For Industrial Control and Automation: low-power and heterogeneous computing advantage enabled by the integrated GPU deliver more than 150 GFLOPS of compute performance over and above the compute capability of the x86 CPU cores6
- For Digital Signage: eye-catching, high-definition multimedia content delivery connected through a variety of display technologies (DP, HDMI™, VGA, LVDS)
- For Electronic Gaming Machines: dedicated hardware acceleration engines for video decode (UVD) and encode (VCE) as well as digital content management (SAMU)
- For SMB storage: high-performance SOC in a small form factor with a myriad of integrated USB and SATA I/O enables a fan-less design, reducing system cost
Benchmarks run by AMD on the new SoC and on Intel Atom D525:
- Sandra Engineering 2011 Dhyrstone, Sandra Engineering 2011 Whetstone and EEMBC CoreMark Multi-thread benchmark average: AMD GX-415GA scored 209, AMD G-T56N scored 98, and Intel Atom D525 scored 93
- 3DMark06 1280×1024 and PassMark Performance Test 7.0 2D Graphics Suite benchmark average: AMD GX-415GA scored 864, AMD G-T56N scored 724, and Intel Atom D525 scored 162
