While it doesn’t get the same attention as their high-profile mobile, desktop, or server CPU offerings, AMD’s embedded division is an important fourth platform for the chipmaker. To that end, this week the company is revealing its lowest-power Ryzen processors ever, with a new series of embedded chips that are designed for use in ultra-compact commercial and industrial systems.
The chips in question are the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1102G and the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1305G SoCs. These parts feature a 6 W or a configurable 8 W – 10 W TDP, respectively. Both SoCs feature two Zen cores with or without simultaneous multithreading, AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphics, 1 MB L2 cache, 4 MB L3 cache, a single channel or a dual-channel memory controller, and two 10 GbE ports.
Two quite capable chips. I’ve always liked these low-power chips and have, on numerous occasions, pondered buying the devices these kinds of chips tend to end up in – small industrial machines, thin clients, that sort of stuff – since they’re cheap and abundant on eBay. Sadly, I can never quite find a use for them.
One of these days, I’d really like to track down a good deal on something powered by this sort of chip, which has a “wall-mounted touch-screen with wired Ethernet” form factor that I could mount next to my bed to serve as the hardware platform for some home-grown smart remote software for my PC.
(Ideally, with the panel interfaced through eDP so software brightness control will be supported by Redshift out of the box and not ARM because I want something where I can run Debian with unattended-upgrades on it and be my own full-stack software update vendor for as long as the hardware lasts… similar to how I build my own IoT things using stuff like ESP8266 or ESP32 dev boards that have been set up to require that a physical programming button be held down for them to respond to requests to be reconfigured… or, ideally, for them to do anything but blindly spew UDP packets if they’re remote sensors.)
My low power AMD E350 already performs quite well, despite its age and in-order CPU architecture. I can only wonder how these wonders might perform at even lower TDP. So impressive 🙂
My Lenovo Yoga 730 uses an Intel ultra low power ship (max TDP of 15w I think 8550U). It’s plenty fast, and once the idiotic CPU throttling feature is disabled (it would throttle down to under 700Mhz after about 1 minute, to keep the fans from spinning up – that’s not even fast enough to keep the mouse pointer running smoothly), it is completely adequate for Gaming. y particular laptop has an nVidia 1050 in it too. Lenovo of course used this to reduce the size of the battery from previous models, instead of keeping the bigger battery, and netting some batter life.
The throttling feature is in Lenovo’s Vantage tool, under “Power Smart Settings” and it’s called “Intelligent Cooling” which is anything but. What a terrible feature. At least it can be disabled – a buddy has the same chip in a desktop (Acer), and I can see the same effect (games run great for 1 or 2 minutes, and then drop right off a cliff), but there’s seemingly no way to disable the idiotic throttling. Windows machines are such a crap shoot.
These aren’t laptop chips, they’re for embedded boards… and I eagerly await the day PC Engines starts shipping a generation with them. They’re wonderful little fanless router boards capable of saturating almost any home ISP connection.
Already there : https://www.udoo.org/udoo-bolt/