Date: 22/05/2012

Piledriver, Bulldozer, and GPU packed AMD' R-series for industrial embedded systems

To address the growing demand for x86 based single board computers in industrial systems and other such graphic intensive embedded computer-board applications, AMD has launched the Embedded R-Series accelerated processing unit (APU) platform. AMD R-series derives much of its features from AMD's recently launched A-Series APU, which was codenamed as Trinity by AMD, a direct competitor to Intel's Ivy Bridge.

The Embedded R-Series APU packs the new "Piledriver" CPU architecture, the "Bulldozer" architecture, with discrete-class, DirectX 11-capable AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics in a heterogeneous multicore embedded processing platform.

These processors target graphics-rich applications such as digital signage computer boards, casino gaming, point-of-sale systems and kiosks, as well as parallel-processing-intensive applications spanning medical imaging and security/surveillance, where industrial grade Single Board Computers (SBC) are preferred. In this market Intel is doing extremely well, now AMD is targeting this market with new R-Series APU.

The scalable new APU saves developers the design time by allowing to leverage the same board design and software stack for more than one application. With on-chip GPU R-Series, saves a graphics card and also reduces the board formfactor. AMD says developers working with the AMD Embedded R-Series APU can implement remote management, client virtualization and security capabilities to help reduce deployment costs and increase security and reliability of their AMD R-Series based platform through AMD DAS 1.0 featuring DASH 1.1, AMD Virtualization and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 support.

Multimedia enhancements available for the AMD Embedded R-Series APU include:

1. A video compression engine that provides a dedicated hardware encoder for video to quickly and efficiently encode video for applications like video conferencing or surveillance;

2. A Secure Asset Management unit that allows for GPU-assisted encryption/decryption of content, enabling less CPU overhead and lower power when dealing with protected content;

3. Enhancements to the Unified Video Decoder that extend the capabilities of the AMD Embedded R-Series APU platform to include dual, high-definition decode and stereoscopic 3D.