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AMD takes Trinity tech into embedded systems

AMD has launched an embedded counterpart to its notebook-oriented Trinity chipset, targeting graphics-intensive applications such as digital signage and surveillance systems.The company unveiled its AMD Embedded R-Series accelerate processing unit (APU) on Monday, just a week after it revealed the Trinity as a direct competitor to Intel's Ivy Bridge.
Written by David Meyer, Contributor

AMD has launched an embedded counterpart to its notebook-oriented Trinity chipset, targeting graphics-intensive applications such as digital signage and surveillance systems.

The company unveiled its AMD Embedded R-Series accelerate processing unit (APU) on Monday, just a week after it revealed the Trinity as a direct competitor to Intel's Ivy Bridge.

The idea behind AMD's APUs is to fuse a multicore CPU with a 'discrete-class' graphics processor, in the R-Series's case a DirectX 11-capable Radeon 7000 Series GPU.

"With the AMD Embedded R-Series, we are taking our APU technology to the next level," AMD embedded chief Buddy Broeker said in a statement.

"By [taking advantage of the APU's] integrated heterogeneous system architecture, developers can tap into a high-performance and efficient parallel processing engine to accelerate their graphics- and compute-intensive applications, all while using industry-standard libraries such as OpenCL and DirectCompute," Broeker explained.

As with the laptop version of Trinity, the R-Series APU uses AMD's Piledriver CPU architecture, which is the second-generation of what it used to call Bulldozer.

According to the chipmaker, the advantage of the R-Series over other embedded platforms is that it removes the need for a separate GPU, making the overall package smaller and more efficient.

The APU has remote management and client virtualisation capabilities, along with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 support for security.

On the multimedia side, it can use a dedicated hardware encoder for video, which may come in handy for video-conference or surveillance applications. Its Unified Video Decoder can also handle both high-definition and stereoscopic 3D content.

The APU can support up to four independent displays or four independent video feeds, although AMD said the addition of a discrete Radeon GPU would take that number up to 10.

Customers already signed up to incorporate the R-Series APU into their products include Advantech-Innocore (casino gaming) and iBase (digital signage), as well as Axiomtek and Shenzhen Xinzhixin, both of whom are using it in their high-performance MiniITX motherboards.

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