14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has launched today its latest CGN Embedded Radeon lineup which will evidently be included inside the new motherboards geared towards embedded consumer devices, like industrial devices, and creative professionals.
Obviously, the embedded market is not guided by gaming or high-performance principles, and the graphics department reflects this. However, when it comes to computing performance for low-budget workstations, the new embedded Radeon line might come in handy for the low-power and high-performance systems.
The new embedded line comes to aid a series of specific industries like medical, aerospace and industrial controls. The new AMD Embedded Radeon lineup comes in three form factors. These are the PCI-Express board, the MXM (Mobile PCI-Express Module) and MCM (Multi-Chip Module), each of them being geared towards different market segments.
Each of these form factors comes with its pros and cons, like power draw and custom configurations. The new cards are the Embedded Radeon E8950, Embedded Radeon E8870, Embedded Radeon E8860, and Embedded Radeon R6465.
Four new cards for professional and industrial use
The best of them all is the Embedded Radeon E8950. It comes as an MXM form factor card and is based on the Tonga GPU. It has 2048 stream processors, 128 texture mapping units and packs 8 GB of GDDR5 memory running along a 256-bit bus interface, while consuming 95W and giving a peak performance of 3 TFLOPs.
This model comes as an elite embedded compute solution in medical and aerospace instruments. The Embedded Radeon E8950 is the most powerful card of them all, and with that amount of teraflops, it will bring all that compute power to fruition.
Next is the Embedded Radeon E8870, which is a weaker model but comes in both MXM and PCI-Express full-length form factors. It has 12 Compute units that include 768 stream, 48 TMUs, and16 Raster operation units.
The Radeon E8870 comes with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory running along a 128-bit bus interface and has a peak performance of 1.5 TFLOPs (FP32). Being second only to the E8950, it consumes a quite high 75W.
Then comes the Embedded Radeon E8860, a model that arrives in MXM, PCI-Express and MCM full-length form factors and relies on a Cape Verde GPU. It has 10 Compute units with 640 stream processors, while packing 2 GB of GDDR5 memory via a 128-bit bus interface churning a peak performance of 1.5 TFLOPs.
The last and the weakest of the new professionals-oriented embedded graphics card is the Embedded Radeon E6465, which is based on the Caicos GPU. It doesn't enjoy any CGN-based parts and the performance is quite disappointing. It comes in MXM, PCI-Express and MCM full-length form factors as well and has only two compute units with 128 stream processors. Memory-wise, it has only 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 128-bit wide bus, and has a total power consumption of up to 20W.
AMD hopes the new graphics cards will play a key role in industrial and professional environments, offering acceptable performance in three key form factors.