The company will no longer only make graphics cards and motherboards

Feb 27, 2014 09:51 GMT  ·  By

Every once in a while the technology market changes enough that the bread and butter of certain corporations loses appeal, so they need to change or expand. Sapphire is expanding its operations right now.

Until now, Sapphire only made graphics cards for personal computers and workstations, motherboards, TV tuner cards, digital audio players, and LCD TVs.

Mostly, graphics cards and motherboards brought in the most money. However, the desktop PC industry is faltering.

And while it won't disappear, ever, customers are showing signs of rarer PC upgrade and more interest in notebooks and mobile gadgets.

Sapphire doesn't really have the expertise and partner chain to jump into, say, mobile devices, wearable gadgets, etc.

It does have alternatives though. The embedded segment is particularly appealing, since it has branches in everything from point-of-sale and kiosks to cars and infotainment systems, even security.

That said, Sapphire has introduced the Embedded Systems Business Unit, which will create motherboards for applications where space is a premium.

That means Digital Signage, Gaming Machines, Video Surveillance and HD Multi-Displays for information systems.

There will be mini-ITX and micro-ATX mainboards, all of them equipped with the AMD Embedded G-Series SoC (system-on-chip).

For those unfamiliar with it, the G-Series SoC is actually an APU (accelerated processing unit) featuring Radeon HD 8000 graphics.

The embedded board, measures 4 x 4 inches / 100 x 100 mm and integrates the G-Series APU, a mini PCI Express slot, an mSATA SSD, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, 2-channel audio, Gigabit LAN.

Sapphire will sell the system to OEMs just as it is or in an extruded metal casing in case the customers want it to be mount on a wall or something along those lines.

Sapphire will ship the embedded motherboard for at least five years, as determined by its partnership with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The G-Series APUs belong to the latter after all.

Up to 10 display outputs are delivered by each single board, enabling multi-monitor and video wall applications.

On that note, the HDMI 1.4a standard is supported, which means that the video streams will be in very high quality.

Other specifications include up to 16 GB of DDR3 memory (SO-DIMM, non-ECC, 1.35 to 1.5 voltages supported), and AMI BIOS. Of course, since the Sapphire embedded motherboards will only ship to companies, you'll never see them in retail, or priced.

The hardware maker isn't giving up its normal operations though, so you shouldn't have trouble finding a mini-ITX or micro-ATX motherboard, and full-size motherboards will keep shipping as well. Between those and many similar offers from Sapphire's competitors, you'll easily find the parts for an HTPC or full-size desktop.