AMD on Tuesday released its flagship FPGA series, and possibly its most important product launch after the company's Xilinx acquisition, the Versal Premium Series Gen 2 SoC. It's hard to call this an FPGA, much in the same way as it's hard to call a modern processor "a CPU," there are many integrated devices, platform interfaces, and application-specific accelerators, and much in the same way, the Versal Premium Series Gen 2 is marketed as an "adaptive SoC," rather than a really powerful FPGA. Speaking of I/O, this is AMD's first product to implement PCI-Express Gen 6 and CXL 3.1.

There's no host platform that currently support these standards—neither EPYC "Turin" nor Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids," but it goes to show that the chip is future-ready and can put the new I/O standards to use. The chip is designed to be implemented as a standalone SoC, and so it supports both DDR5 RDIMMs and LPDDR5X, giving end-users the flexibility to go with the two vastly different memory standards depending on what their application is. These capabilities make the Versal Premium Series Gen 2 well-suited for demanding applications in sectors like data centers, communications, test and measurement, aerospace, and defense, where high-speed data processing is critical.

AMD today announced the expansion of the AMD Versal adaptive system on chip (SoC) portfolio with the new Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 adaptive SoCs, which bring preprocessing, AI inference, and postprocessing together in a single device for end-to-end acceleration of AI-driven embedded systems.

These initial devices in the Versal Series Gen 2 portfolio build on the first generation with powerful new AI Engines expected to deliver up to 3x higher TOPs-per-watt than first generation Versal AI Edge Series devicesi, while new high-performance integrated Arm CPUs are expected to offer up to 10x more scalar compute than first gen Versal AI Edge and Prime series devicesii.

AMD today announced the launch of AMD Embedded+, a new architectural solution that combines AMD Ryzen Embedded processors with Versal adaptive SoCs onto a single integrated board to deliver scalable and power-efficient solutions that accelerate time-to-market for original design manufacturer (ODM) partners. Validated by AMD, the Embedded+ integrated compute platform helps ODM customers reduce qualification and build times for faster time-to-market without needing to expend additional hardware and R&D resources. ODM integration using Embedded+ architecture enables the use of a common software platform to develop designs with low power, small form factors, and long lifecycles for medical, industrial, and automotive applications.

"In automated systems, sensor data has diminishing value with time and must operate on the freshest information possible to enable the lowest latency, deterministic response," said Chetan Khona, senior director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets, AMD. "In industrial and medical applications, many decisions need to happen in milliseconds. Embedded+ maximizes the value of partner and customer data, with energy efficiency and performant computing that enables them to focus in turn on addressing their customer and market needs."