Two of the most important processor brands in the embedded computing market are Intel and ARM. Is there room for a third?
Well, AMD certainly thinks so with its Fusion architecture being designed in to ETX and XTX COM systems.
Congatec believes the introduction of ETX and XTX modules based on AMD Fusion processors gives these embedded computing form factors a viable future.
According to congatec, Intel’s discontinuation of the 855 chipset family left a major gap in the market particularly for ETX computer modules, which primarily affected the higher performance range of applications.
“This gap has now been closed by processor manufacturer AMD with the Fusion architecture, which also opens up new graphics-oriented applications,” said the supplier.
The firm’s AMD Fusion architecture-based ETX and XTX COM modules are the conga-EAF and conga-XAF.
The difference between the XTX and the ETX standard is that XTX no longer supports the ISA bus, but instead a four-lane PCI Express bus.
XTX also has more S-ATA and USB interfaces than ETX.
The company offers a choice of five AMD embedded G-Series processor options ranging from a single-core 1.2GHz AMD T44R (64kbyte L1 cache, 512kbyte x2 L2 cache) with 9W TDP, to a 1.6GHz dual-core AMD T56N (64kbyte L1 cache, 512kbyte x2 L2 cache) with 18W TDP.
There is a graphics core with the Universal Video Decoder 3.0 for MPEG-2 HD and DivX (MPEG-4) videos and it will support DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0 for fast 2D and 3D imaging as well as OpenCL 1.1.
The APU has two independent graphics controllers providing a VESA-compliant video output with resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 pixels