Design West: AMD Announces New System-on-Chip

The Design West conference is underway this week in San Jose. It's a four-day event launched last year as a technical conference for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals. AMD, Emerson and Wind River all have announcements from the event.

AMD announces new System-on-Chip. AMD announced the new AMD Embedded G-Series System-on-Chip (SOC) platform, a single-chip solution based on the AMD "Jaguar" CPU architecture and AMD Radeon 8000 Series graphics. Compared to the prior generation AMD G-Series APU the the new G-Series chip offers up to 113 percent improved CPU performance, and up to a 125 percent advantage when compared to the Intel Atom when running multiple industry-standard compute intensive benchmarks. The new processor family offers superior performance per watt in the low-power x86-compatible product category with 9W – 25W options. "As the Internet of Things permeates every aspect of our life from work to home and everything where in between, devices require high performance, I/O connectivity and energy efficiency in smaller packages," said Colin Barnden, principal analyst, Semicast Research. "With this new AMD SOC design, the AMD Embedded G-Series platform offers the perfect mix of high performance, a small footprint, low energy use and full I/O integration to enable smaller form-factor embedded designs, cool and efficient operation, and simplified build requirements. AMD has leapfrogged the competition by combining the power of an x86 CPU and the performance of AMD Radeon graphics with the I/O interconnect all on a single die."

Emerson launches new VPX system. Emerson Network Power (EMR) announced its latest embedded systems VPX system chassis, the KR8-VPX-3-6-1. Designed primarily for development, testing and lab duties, the KR8-VPX-3-6-1 can also be deployed in ground benign installations as it meets Emerson’s standard safety, electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and environmental requirements. The chassis supports up to five 3U and 6U Eurocard formats that are most popular with users of VMEbus. It will enable original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to rapidly develop, test and evolve their applications. “The new VPX-based KR8 chassis is designed to make it as easy as possible for developers to get ahead with their application development,” said Eric Gauthier, vice president product marketing for Emerson Network Power’s Embedded Computing business. “Coming hot on the heels of our recently announced VPX3000 system-level OpenVPX fanless enclosure and iVPX-7225 3U processor blade, this new development and deployment platform underlines Emerson Network Power’s commitment to having the building blocks in place to be a leading provider of custom and complete integrated solutions in this market.”

Wind River launches secure separation kernel.  Intel (INTC) subsidiary Wind River introduced the latest version of its VxWorks MILS Platform, a secure separation kernel that is compliant to the Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP). Part of the Wind River portfolio of trusted systems, the Type 1 hypervisor–based, multiple independent levels of security (MILS) platform is ready for use in security-critical systems that may require system-level high assurance evaluation or certification and accreditation (C&A). VxWorks MILS Platform partitions a single processor among multiple software components, with time and space resource allocation, information flow control, and fault isolation -- all strictly enforced to conform to security policies defined by security architects and system integrators. “Companies responsible for creating robust infrastructure systems worldwide are demanding increased functionality and secure operation with high assurance of security from inadvertent or intentional errors or threats,” said Jim Douglas, senior vice president of marketing at Wind River. “VxWorks MILS can serve as the foundation for security-critical devices and systems in applications ranging from military and aerospace to industrial, medical, and automotive.”