AMD announced a major expansion of its embedded x86 microprocessors today, expanding both its Ryzen client and EPYC server lines to new product types and target markets.
It gave a number of companies early access to these chips, which means that the relevant operating systems are already to run, including Redhat RHEL 7.4, Canonical Ubuntu 17.04, Mentor MEL (Dogwood), WindRiver Linux Base, Yocto 2.2 (Morty) and Windows 10 (Redstone 3) for the Ryzen V1000 APUs family.
It has specific products and end-markets in mind for these chips (see the Figure): In particular:
- Ryzen Embedded – thin client, casino and arcade gaming, military and aerospace, IoT gateway, medical imaging, industrial and machine vision products.
- EPYC Embedded – router, networking, storage, edge computing products as well as in some of the most advanced IoT gateway, military and aerospace and industrial/machine learning systems.
This is no mere wish list – its announcement was endorsed by a number of relevant manufacturers of almost all these solutions. I spoke with Quixant for instance who manufacture casino and gaming machines; they like the promised 10-year onward support for the platform and the ability to run 4 high definition displays from one chip.
AMD also announced a lot more today – our full analysis is available to subscribers of our data center service.