Tuesday, 23 April 2013 20:54

Here come the Jaguars

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AMD-logo

AMD expanded their offer of embedded solutions with a new generation APU's based on the Jaguar architecture. The new APU's, or better to say SoC's because beside x86 cores and graphics combine and southbridge functions with TDP ranging from 9-25 watts depending on the model, and will replace existing embedded APU Solutions from Series G on the market. Architecture Jaguar is used in the chip that will power the upcoming Playstation 4, and probably a new Xbox.

28-nanometer SoC's contain 2 to 4 Jaguar cores and Radeon HD 8000 series of graphics based on the GCN architecture. There is also a single-channel DDR3 controller and communication section - four PCIe x1, one PCIe x4, 8 USB2.0, two USB3.0, 2x SATA 6Gb/s, the logic to access SD cards and other interfaces.
architecture

The new generation of APUs represents another step in the transition to the HSA or Heterogeneous System Architecture. X86 and graphics cores in the new APU's share L2 cache which significantly speeds up the operations performed by the GPU. Of course, the emphasis here is not on the 3D performance, but the use of GPU for computation via OpenCL. The idea is that this kind of energy-saving chip can still offer the high performance required for such analysis of real-time video. AMD intends precisely in this context to establish themselves as competition to ARM SoC's and Intel's Atom in SoC variants.
models

Specifically, AMD boasts that the new SoC's offer 113% better x86 performance compared to previous generation APU's or 125% better performance than the Intel Atom. When it comes to graphics, the new generation is 20% percent better than the old and 430% better than the graphics that Intel solutions boast in the same market segment.

Finally, it is interesting that in a logo of new generation G platform is a small letter "X". Since AMD already announced Opteron-based ARM architecture, we are not at all surprised if in the near future on the market shows up AMD's SoC's that integrate Radeon graphics and ARM cores.

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Read 2212 times Last modified on Tuesday, 23 April 2013 21:18

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