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When AMD, Intel, or Nvidia launch new hardware, they almost always focus on the high-finish of the consumer market place. Low-stop parts and server/workstation solutions typically follow at later dates. This fourth dimension around, nonetheless, AMD is shaking things up and introducing support for DDR4 in a new embedded SoC, codenamed Merlin Falcon. The new chip leverages the Excavator CPU and the same basic silicon as AMD's Carrizo, just with additional validation and testing for the embedded market, including support for its L2 cache and RAM.

AMD-Embedded2

Co-ordinate to the company's BIOS and Kernel Developer's Guide for Excavator-class parts (Family unit 15h Models 60h-6Fh), Carrizo was designed to back up either DDR3 or DDR4 in the same unified northbridge. This raises the question of why the company is only rolling out DDR4 support in the embedded market place? According to Colin Cureton, senior director of AMD's embedded product direction squad, it comes down to lifecycle back up and Carrizo / Carrizo-L's market position. Embedded hardware is typically expected to operate for at to the lowest degree five years, with vii-9 years being relatively common. Right now, the consumer market is still mostly based on DDR3, but that will change over the adjacent few years as DDR4 productions and clock speeds ramp upwards. If you lot're buying hardware today and desire inexpensive RAM iv years from now, DDR4 makes more sense.

The other reason AMD stuck with DDR3 for Carrizo was to brand information technology easier for OEMs to blueprint flexible systems. Carrizo and Carrizo-50 at present share a common form factor, a essentially overlapping power envelope, and use the same kind of retentiveness. Carrizo-L, withal, is based on AMD'southward Puma+ CPU core, which is basically the Jaguar core from 2013 with a few boosted changes and ability tweaks. Since that fleck doesn't support DDR4, AMD opted to stick with DDR3 across its mobile and desktop stack.

We should annotation it's non articulate how much boosted benefit AMD would take really gotten from DDR4 in whatever instance. While more than bandwidth is broadly better for integrated GPUs, our Kaveri tests when that chip was launched indicated that it's non an absolute. Nosotros saw improve performance with lower-latency DDR3-2133 than high-latency DDR3-2400. It'southward possible that the power envelopes AMD wanted to sell into and the cost premiums attached to DDR4, it simply didn't make sense to bring a DDR4 Carrizo to market — at least non nevertheless. With Zen delayed to 2017, it's possible we could see such a function next twelvemonth.

When AMD built Carrizo, information technology focused on making the chip smaller and on cutting its overall ability consumption. Those are traits that should serve Merlin Falcon well, as shown in the slide below:

AMD-Embedded5

The older solution required ii separate chips and was 1.92mm tall; the new package can limbo into a minimum height of just 1.62mm. The total bit surface area for the older two-flake solution was 1528 mm sq, while Merlin Falcon is just 1073mm sq.Like AMD's total desktop parts, Merlin Falcon will include full support for HSA and tin can leverage a complete Linux open-source stack. All of the typical features of Carrizo's integrated GPU, including multiple display-outs, hardware decode support for H.264 and H.265, and HSA one.0 support are also included. The SKUs themselves are shown beneath:

AMD-Embedded3

There aren't many surprises hither. Like AMD's mobile Carrizo, Merlin Falcon focuses on the 12-25W power envelope, with chips bachelor in dual and quad-core configurations, equally well equally a CPU-merely version of the core with somewhat higher clocks. Overall performance is covered on the next slide — similar Carrizo, Merlin Falcon is far more than power efficient within the same TDP envelope than Kaveri was.

AMD-Embedded4

In the graph in a higher place, the blue lines are Merlin Falcon products while the single grey line is AMD'due south previous Hierofalcon SoC. AMD'due south measured functioning in CoreMark is fairly competitive with Intel's 15W Cadre i3 and Cadre i5 processors, but whether or not Coremark maps well to embedded workloads isn't a question we've spent much time studying. Overall, AMD wants to position these devices as suitable for pachinko systems, lottery terminals, communications infrastructure, medical imaging devices (where HSA's capabilities could come in handy) and security and retail signage.

Unfortunately, AMD wasn't able to bespeak to any major client announcements for these products, just that's not uncommon in the embedded space. Embedded hardware, by its very nature, tends to be invisible. At the same time, given AMD'southward overall fiscal condition, the visitor needs every scrap of sales revenue it tin observe — we've asked for details on any upcoming wins or new customers and will update this story if we hear back.