AMD Refreshes Embedded GPU Lineup, Launches Polaris-Based Embedded Radeon E9560 & E93

[harlan4096]

AMD’s GPU division has long had its hands in many businesses. While their consumer GPUs and semi-custom efforts tend to attract the most attention – and more recently, their GPU co-development deal with Samsung – it’s still not the entirety of AMD’s GPU efforts. The company also has an arm of the GPU business developing products for the embedded market, which aptly enough are sold as AMD’s Embedded Radeon products.

With extremely long product cycle times and niche use cases, we don’t regularly hear from the Embedded Radeon team. In fact, prior to today, the last time the company announced anything was three years ago with the E9000 series of products. But this week with the Global Gaming Expo taking place in Las Vegas (ed: so the gambling kind of gaming), AMD’s embedded group has popped up to announce a couple of new products.

Being revealed today are the Embedded Radeon E9560, and its lower-power counterpart, the E9390. Both are based on AMD’s Polaris 10 GPU, and are designed to fit in to AMD’s existing E9000 family of embedded video cards, as part of what AMD calls its “ultra-high performance” band. The E9560 is a 36 CU part with a max TDP of 130 Watts, and will become AMD’s highest performing Embedded Radeon part yet. Meanwhile the E9390 is a 28 CU part with a lower TDP of 75W, allowing it to work in systems without an auxiliary PCIe power connector.

These parts are, to be honest, unremarkable from a technical perspective. And AMD’s own announcement is fairly low key to match. AMD already offers a Polaris 10-based part here, the E9550, so the newest parts aren’t bringing new features to the table. Nor are AMD’s gaming customers necessarily looking for something new.

Instead, the thrust of AMD’s announcement today is on the business side of matters. As casino gaming is a conservative, long cycle business where individual parts need to be qualified, AMD offers a limited number of products for a number of years to meet those needs. Specifically, AMD guarantees that it will offer its Embedded Radeon products for a minimum of 3 years. And, as it so happens, the last Embedded Radeon products were announced 3 years ago.
...

Continue Reading