Colin Cureton, senior manager with AMD Embedded, said: “There are a lot of things happening which lend themselves to AMD’s technology. Included is more and more rich multimedia content; not only viewing it, but also interacting with it.” Other developments include a greater focus on security and on parallel computing.
The R Series, which has been called Merlin Falcon internally, is said to bring a smaller form factor to applications such as medical imaging and industrial control. AMD’s previous offering required a standalone ‘south bridge’ chip, but this functionality has been integrated into the R Series.
The R series features AMD’s ‘Excavator’ core, which supports up to 15% more instructions per clock, according to Cureton, who noted this is achieved through ‘better caches and better branch prediction’.
Power consumption has been an important design target, said Cureton. “All parts feature a thermal design power ranging from 12W to 35W, configurable by the BIOS and operating system. This allows developers to optimise their products for performance or for power consumption.”
When comparing R Series to the previous generation, Cureton claimed designers can specify the same performance, but with 20W less power consumption or get a 22% performance boost for the same power.
Five parts are available with a choice of dual or quad x86 cores running at up to 3.4GHz. The SoCs can also be supplied with up to eight GPUs and are available in CPU only format. All parts are specified for use in temperatures ranging from 0 to 90°C, but an industrial temperature option of -40 to 105°C is available.
