New AMD Embedded G-Series APUs Provide Thirty Nine Percent Power Reduction for Fanless Designs

AMD Fusion technology, named “Best in Show” at Embedded Systems Conference, is available for full-featured, fanless embedded systems in as little as 5.5W.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced immediate availability of two new AMD Embedded G-Series APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) with thermal design power (TDP) ratings of 5.5 and 6.4 watts, up to a 39 percent power savings compared to earlier versions¹. The very low power consumption and small 361mm² package is ideal for compact, fanless embedded systems like digital signage, kiosks, mobile industrial devices and many of the new emerging industry-standard small form factors such as Qseven. This is an unprecedented low-power offering for the embedded market that features one or two low-power x86 “Bobcat” CPU cores and a discreet class DirectX® 11-capable GPU on a single die.


 “We have seen many of our embedded customers deploy fanless systems even with our 15W TDP processors in the past. Today we take the ground-breaking AMD Fusion APU well below 7W TDP and shatter the accepted traditional threshold for across-the-board fanless enablement,” said Buddy Broeker, director, Embedded Solutions, AMD. “System designers can now unleash their creativity without being constrained by heat or size issues.”


 A fanless solution is crucial for many small embedded systems where the added cost for an active cooling system can be prohibitive or for environments where silent operation is a key requirement. Additionally, many embedded products are deployed in harsh environmental conditions where the presence of a fan represents a potential failure point for the system. The AMD Embedded G-Series platform provides enterprise-class features and performance with the reliability, cost- and power-efficiencies these systems require.


 Systems based on the new low power AMD Embedded G-Series platform include an industrial mobile device from Amtek, a Pico-ITX single board computer from Axiomtek, a Qseven form factor computer-on-module from datakamp, and a fanless digital signage platform from iBASE. Additional customers are expected to bring new products to market in the coming quarters.


Contributed by Bob Johnson's Computer Stuff

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Will Desktops Ever Make a Comeback?

Laptops are becoming increasingly popular. Personally, I haven't owned a desktop in five years and don't see myself ever going back to being desktop-only household. Nothing beats using my wireless laptop from anywhere in my home. If I'm cooking from a recipe I found online, I just put the computer on my kitchen counter. If I'm sick, tired or just being lazy, I can take the laptop to bed with me. And on nice spring days, I can work outside, on my porch, vs. being tied to my desk and stuck inside all day. Not to mention I can take my computer with me anywhere I go, whether it be a vacation or to a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.

But it seems as though I'm not alone. Desktop sales are falling and laptop sales on the rise. Does that mean desktops are gone forever? Not according to a few people at AMD and Via.

Patrick Moorehead, a vice president at AMD, told the New York Times he sees the computers reemerging as "small form-factor desktop[s]." Via Vice President Richard Brown is also optimistic, asserting that desktops in the corporate world are not going away anytime soon.

But according to research firm IDC, desktop shipments will decline over the next few years. In the United States, in 2009 alone, desktop shipments were expected to drop 14.2%. In 2010, they will fall another 3.6% and 1.9% in 2011. However, international desktop shipment numbers look a little different. While shipments were expected to decline 12.9% in 2009, they are expected to gradually rise again in the following years: 0.1% in 2010, 1.6% in 2011, 2.0% in 2012 and 0.9% in 2013.

According to Brown, that worldwide increase can be attributed to Asia, "In China and elsewhere, those people have started to desire a real computer when they get home. They want a bigger screen and more power. The desktop offers that."

Even so, laptops and other portable computer shipments are expected to increase at unbelievable, double-digit rates over the next four years, due to the fact that users are becoming increasingly mobile. There's no question notebook computers will continue to dominate the market in the near future but as for the desktop, only time will tell what becomes of it.

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Seagate Demos 6Gbs Hard-Drive Transfer Speed

It looks like Seagate and AMD are already planning for the future for SATA drives by showing off their first tech demo of Serial ATA Revision 3.0. That is pretty much a fancy name for SATA 3. The new SATA 3 cables will feature a new transfer rate of six gigabits per second (589.09 MB/s) which is double to the speed of the current generation SATA 2 cables (288.55 MB/s).

Before you get excited though you should know that this will not double the transfer rate of data for your hard drive. Currently no Hard Drive, even the SSDs, have broke the SATA 2 288.55 MB/s data transfer cab, but some are getting close, the Intel X-25M is currently the highest at 250MB/s.

So why bother you may ask, Seagate commented by saying that usually the SATA cable technology always improves a couple of years in advance of the Hard Drives. Also the new spec also includes greater support for streaming operations in its Native Command Queue, so you can do streaming reads/writes without grinding all the rest of your operations to a halt. Even better news is the SATA 3 cables will be fully compatible with all SATA 2 products and will be out by the end of the year.

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AMD Launches Phenom II CPU

AMD's first Quad Core 45nm CPU chip is finally out the doors and its being called the Phenom II. AMD has positioned the Phenom II CPU in between Intel's Core 2 Quad and Core i7 and is being sold in two versions, the 2.8GHz X4 920 ($235) and the 3.0GHz X4 940 Black Edition ($275). Each Phenom CPU has an L3 cache size of 8MB but still trails in performance when compared to the 12MB L3 cache of the Intel Core i7's. However, what truly makes this chip stand out is that the Black Editions overclocking capabilities. Overclocking enthusiasts using liquid nitrogen have managed to bring the Phenom clock speeds over 6GHz surpassing the world record for Intel Core i7 processors, which stands at 5.5 GHz.

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