Kishan Jainandunsing
(February 2006)

At the recent VITA Bus & Board Conference in Long Beach, CA, January 16, 2006, AMD continued to mount its efforts to expand in the vertical embedded industry. The company promoted its single and dual core AMD64 Opteron processors in combination with 3rd party chipsets in single and dual processor configurations. Of particular interest is the fact that systems can be readily expanded into n-way SMP configurations using the HyperTransport links natively on the AMD64 Opteron processors. In these configurations each AMD64 Opteron CPU integrates its own memory controller. This architecture, in combination with point-to-point links between CPUs can result in dramatic performance gains in SMP applications.

Earlier last year, at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) West in San Francisco, CA, the company announced support for vertical embedded markets with its AMD64 Opteron processors. According to the company it guarantees a product life of 5 years on select AMD64 Opteron processor models. The company partners with several companion chip suppliers for I/O and graphics, including ATI, BroadCom, LSI Logic and NVidia. This gives designers a wide range of options for high-speed I/O and graphics in their applications and it may not be too long before the first COM Express modules with AMD64 Opteron processors make their debut in the embedded market place.