AMD announced a new System-on-a-Chip platform dubbed as the AMD Embedded G-Series.  Based on the AMD next-generation “Jaguar” CPU architecture and AMD Radeon 8000 Series graphics, the announcement of the platform signifies AMD’s push beyond the PC industry moving to smart TVs, set-top-boxes, interactive digital signage and informational kiosks.

The Embedded G-Series offers up to 113 percent improved CPU performance compared to the prior generation AMD Embedded G-Series APU, and up to a 125 percent advantage compared to the Intel Atom when running multiple industry-standard compute intensive benchmarks.1

For embedded applications, the new platform also includes support for DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.2x and OpenCL 1.22 that enable parallel processing and high-performance graphics processing, yielding up to 20 percent graphics improvement over the previous AMD Embedded G-Series APU, and greater than 5x advantage over Intel Atom when running multiple industry-standard graphics-intensive benchmarks.

But what’s the deal with the little ‘x’ placed on the lower right corner of the logo?  The X signifies the x86 chip AMD uses, but why put it when everyone knows that its what it uses for its chips?

According to AMD’s Arun Iyengar, AMD will soon have both x86 and ARM chips in its portfolio.  The Embedded G-Series marked with X will serve power envelopes of 9W all the way up to 25W, while the A-branded versions could deliver power consumption right down to less than 3W.  What this means is that there could be a possibility that in the future, tablets will be equipped with AMD Embedded platform instead of Exynos or Snapdragon that will deliver longer battery life, and better emphasis on graphics and parallel processing.

The plan to use ARM ships on its Embedded G-Series may have stemmed from Applied Micro’s announcement of a 64-bit, ARM-based chip dubbed as the X-Gene SOC.  The X-Gene is first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller, is only 40 nanometersm, has 8 2.4 GHz ARM cores, 4 ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software, 4 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various other ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards.

But aside from using ARM, AMD has a lot of things going on for them as one of the early supporters of HP Moonshot, the PC-maker’s first software defined server, designed and tailored for specific workloads to deliver optimum performance.  AMD’s Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Server Business Suresh Gopalakrishnan even stated that Moonshot is the platform to go with if your  workloads are very scale-out oriented.