AMD Announces Mini PC Initiative, Brings the Fight to Intel in Yet Another Product Segment

[Raevenlord]

AMD is wading into even deeper waters across Intel's markets with the announcement of new Mini-PCs powered by the company's AMD Ryzen embedded V1000 and R1000 processors. Mini PCs, powered by AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 and R1000 processors. Multiple partners such as ASRock Industrial, EEPD, OnLogic and Simply NUC have already designed their own takes on Mini-PCs (comparable to Intel's NUC, Next unit of Computing) as a way to give businesses a way to have a small form factor box for different computing needs. These aim to offer a high-performance CPU/GPU processor with expansive peripheral support, in-depth security features and a planned 10-year processor availability.

Until now, AMD's Ryzen Embedded product line had mostly scored one design win here and there, powering handheld consoles such as the Smach Z and such other low power, relatively high-performance environments. When AMD announced the R1000 SoC back in April, it already announced that partners would be bringing their own takes on the underlying silicon, and today is the announcement of that effort.





AMD Ryzen Embedded Mini PCs make use of an open software approach through Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) and OpenCL. These Ryzen Embedded platforms are also well suited for machine vision, object detection, edge inference, and analytics, opening up a new growth space for AMD in now neatly produced and packaged Mini PCs. Through AMD's V1000 efforts, partners can have SoCs that carry 'Zen' CPUs and 'Vega' GPUs on a single die, offering up to four CPU cores/eight threads and up to 11 GPU compute units to achieve processing throughput as high as 3.6 TFLOPS in a 12-54 W configurable package. The R1000, on the other hand, will come in in 15-25 W solutions.







Steven Chiang, CEO, AlphaInfo: "We're excited to support this new ecosystem of Mini PCs powered by AMD Ryzen Embedded processors. At AlphaInfo our expertise with advanced data integration, mature software engineering and technology industry data analysis and management allows us to create innovative and robust application systems that suit every customer's unique needs, whether it's in an embedded application or a Mini PC providing compute power at the edge."

Mike Daulerio, Vice President of Business Development, Beechwoods Software: "Beechwoods is thrilled to be one of the partner companies supporting AMD's open ecosystem. Our IoT Edge Gateway software leverages the advanced compute capabilities of the Ryzen Embedded Processor family to enable smarter, more secure solutions with headroom for future proofing."

Eric Simone, CEO, ClearBlade: "Frameworks, standards and open source ecosystems are essential to the sustainable success of connected systems that scale. We're honored to support the ecosystem of Mini PCs powered by AMD Ryzen Embedded processors, essential to design, engineer and support secure, real-time, scalable IoT solutions."

AMD Ryzen Embedded Processor Overview

The AMD Ryzen Embedded processors bring together AMD "Zen" CPU and "Vega" GPU architectures in a seamlessly integrated SoC solution for high-performance compute to support the modern computing needs of industrial, media, and enterprise applications.

The AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 and R1000 processors provide scalable solutions from 6 watts to 54 watts in a pin compatible package that powers high resolution, 4K multi-display configurability, high-performance 3D graphics all while enabling extended availability that alleviates replacement cycles and minimizes customer costs.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[fancucker]

Good job AMD

One the best applications of their APU model. Vega and Zen are a good marriage. But would still love Vega/Navi with Ice-lake more. Make it happen!

 

[windwhirl]

AMD is on a roll lately. Nice.

Good job AMD

One the best applications of their APU model. Vega and Zen are a good marriage. But would still love Vega/Navi with Ice-lake more. Make it happen!

Unlikely. Intel are working on their own discrete GPU and they already have IGPs. That NUC chimera will probably never happen again.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

AMD is on a roll lately. Nice.


Unlikely. Intel are working on their own discrete GPU and they already have IGPs. That NUC chimera will probably never happen again.

I still don’t understand that marriage. It happened once and there were no sequels or even any proper OEM applications that I can recall. I expected it to show up in a refreshed Mac-mini, but even that didn’t happen.

 

[windwhirl]

I still don’t understand that marriage. It happened once and there were no sequels or even any proper OEM applications that I can recall. I expected it to show up in a refreshed Mac-mini, but even that didn’t happen.

Neither do I. If I had to throw a wild guess, I think Intel wanted some practice using EMIB and also to scout some Radeon talent for their own graphics IP.

Again, that's a wild guess, and I wouldn't back that up with even 5 cents.

EDIT: And I don't know what AMD could have gained from this, besides selling a few extra Radeon chips. An ego boost, maybe, from seeing their CPU rival give in to the idea of using a AMD IGP on Team Blue's CPUs? More wild guesses.

 

[theGryphon]

Whoever brought this initiative and pushed it deserves a round of applause. AMD needs to turn in some profits out of this Zen wave, and this can be key to break the mold for many organizations and can establish AMD as a viable computing solution. Next step comes the datacenter...

Neither do I. If I had to throw a wild guess, I think Intel wanted some practice using EMIB and also to scout some Radeon talent for their own graphics IP.

Again, that's a wild guess, and I wouldn't back that up with even 5 cents.

EDIT: And I don't know what AMD could have gained from this, besides selling a few extra Radeon chips. An ego boost, maybe, from seeing their CPU rival give in to the idea of using a AMD IGP on Team Blue's CPUs? More wild guesses.

I agree. It was most likely INTELs brainchild with not so innocent motives. They probably paid AMD well, otherwise it doesn't make sense for AMD. In retrospect, things are clearer...

 

[gasolina]

and the price is 400$ to nearly 500$ for the pc here is the link from china https://s.taobao.com/search?q=ryzen...tem.1&ie=utf8&initiative_id=tbindexz_20170306

 

[prtskg]

Neither do I. If I had to throw a wild guess, I think Intel wanted some practice using EMIB and also to scout some Radeon talent for their own graphics IP.

Again, that's a wild guess, and I wouldn't back that up with even 5 cents.

EDIT: And I don't know what AMD could have gained from this, besides selling a few extra Radeon chips. An ego boost, maybe, from seeing their CPU rival give in to the idea of using a AMD IGP on Team Blue's CPUs? More wild guesses.

Intel provided much needed money to AMD and in turn scored some AMD gpu guys. Win - win situation for both of them, my guess. And engineering loss for AMD wasn't huge. Most of the people who left had non-engineering jobs.

 

[mtcn77]

I agree. It was most likely INTELs brainchild with not so innocent motives. They probably paid AMD well, otherwise it doesn't make sense for AMD. In retrospect, things are clearer...

AMD was inherently advantageous since Intel doesn't have a heterogeneous compute architecture. They were already up 1 chip in count.
This isn't what excites me however. Cartridge cpus are the fever, imo. Let's hope we can run with expectations some day. Tango PC!

Spoiler: Youtube

 

[Xajel]

Seeing this mini PC's are very good from AMD, and building the base for their partners made it even more appealing, I personally hoped this since Zen launched. But I have some caveats here.

• AMD is only making it now for mission critical and specialised situation, they're using their first gen. "Zen" on the very establishment and mature 14nm process.
• All of these uses a CPU, not APU, the partner/manufacturer must include a dGPU.
• There's no consumer grade version yet, they don't have the latest APU's. I really hope AMD is waiting for their "Renoir" APU's with Zen2 to make it good enough. But I also would like to have any remaining PCIe lanes to be offered as M.2 slots.

I still don’t understand that marriage. It happened once and there were no sequels or even any proper OEM applications that I can recall. I expected it to show up in a refreshed Mac-mini, but even that didn’t happen.

Intel killed it by them selfs, since they launched it actually, then just about 2-3 months ago they killed it officially.

How they killed it? basically, they launched it with an older 7th gen architecture with 4C CPU, while in the same time they launched their newer 8th gen 6C CPU's, it's price was higher than CPU +GPU+GDDR5 combination, so the only benefit it brings was you get almost the same performance of an old 4C architecture + dGPU in a smaller real estate to create smaller & thinner laptops. It was a small market to start with, and the use of older 7th gen arch. made it worst, and being a more expensive option and also harder to find one made it also hard.

 

[INSTG8R]

Intel killed it by them selfs, since they launched it actually, then just about 2-3 months ago they killed it officially.

How they killed it? basically, they launched it with an older 7th gen architecture with 4C CPU, while in the same time they launched their newer 8th gen 6C CPU's, it's price was higher than CPU +GPU+GDDR5 combination, so the only benefit it brings was you get almost the same performance of an old 4C architecture + dGPU in a smaller real estate to create smaller & thinner laptops. It was a small market to start with, and the use of older 7th gen arch. made it worst, and being a more expensive option and also harder to find one made it also hard.

Not too mention they were absolutely terrible with supporting it driver wise even tho AMD was perfectly willin to support it

 

[Super XP]

AMD is on a roll lately. Nice.


Unlikely. Intel are working on their own discrete GPU and they already have IGPs. That NUC chimera will probably never happen again.

Intel's discrete GPUs aren't going as well as originally thought.
But you never know.