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.


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.


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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