Intel And AMD Target Integrated Chips On Embedded Market

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are planning new processors aimed at giving their x86-based products greater traction in the growing embedded devices market.

Intel’s new portfolio of Atom processors, the E600 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) series, and AMD’s upcoming G-Series of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) will both hit the market in the first quarter of 2011, giving each company new offerings that they hope will help them expand the reach of their products.

On-chip Graphics Opens New Possibilities

The market for embedded chips – which go into such devices as military hardware, gasoline pumps, ATM machines, point-of-sale machines, digital signs, automobiles and industrial equipment – has been put as high as $10 billion (£6 billion) and growing.

“It’s a big market, it’s growing and it’s worthwhile for us to pay attention to,” Cameron Swen, senior product marketing manager at AMD, said in an interview with eWEEK.

Both Intel and AMD have participated in the embedded space for years. However, other chip vendors – particularly those like Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments, who use processor designs from ARM to build their products – are major players. With the market growing as quickly as it is, the embedded space is an attractive area for Intel and AMD, looking to grow their businesses beyond their core PC and server chip areas.

Driving the market growth are changes in the embedded devices themselves, according to Jonathan Luse, director of marketing for Intel’s Embedded and Communications Group.

“They’re becoming connected and they’re becoming more intelligent,” Luse said during a Webcast.

For Intel, that was a key driver behind the development of the E600C series Atom processors, formerly codenamed “Tunnel Creek”. Intel is integrating Altera field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which enable device makers to program the chips for the specific requirements of their customers for applications in areas such as the military, industrial businesses, and transportation. In addition, the chips can be updated or reprogrammed after they are sold, Luse said.

That capability gives device makers and their customers greater flexibility in how they program and use their processors, he said. “A lot of embedded devices have very customer-specific applications,” Luse said.

In addition, integrating the Atom and Altera technology lets Intel engineers put more capabilites onto a single processor, reducing the number of chips needed to perform various functions and enabling device makers to build smaller products, he said. The E600C is created by linking an Atom E600 and the Altera FPGA by a PCI-Express connection.

Intel in the first quarter of 2011 will start selling 1.3GHz and 1GHz versions of the E600C with various temperature ranges for both commercial and industrial applications, starting at $72 (£45) per 1,000 sold. Later in the quarter, Intel will start selling lower-power versions – at 600MHz – also aimed at commercial and industrial applications, starting at $61 (£38).

Fusion With The Embedded Markets

AMD’s G-Series marks the introduction into the embedded market of the company’s Fusion strategy of putting the low=power x86 CPU and high-end graphics technology on a single piece of silicon. AMD officials spoke of their upcoming “eBrazos” platform during its annual Financial Analyst Day earlier this month.

The inclusion of the integrated graphics engine in the vendor’s APU design is a key differentiator from other offerings in the embedded market, AMD’s Swen said. It gives device makers greater flexibility in their designs and presents customers with greater capabilities in the technologies they buy. For those embedded systems that do not need a lot of graphics capabilities but want high computer performance, the G-Series can support Open CL and other software, he said.

“They want complete embedded platforms,” Swen said, adding that he believes the G-Series offers “exceptional graphics performance in a very small footprint”.

AMD is planning to expand its embedded capabilities even more as 2011 wears on. The upcomign R-Series will leverage AMD’s Llano APU, Swen said.