AMD perseveres with embedded push

WITH AMD'S CLOSURE of its Longmont Development Centre, where the old NS Geode designs were designed, and the sale of the Alchemy division, some may have feared that the embedded market may not have been such a focus for the firm any longer.

All this happened at the time when Intel has been scaling back its embedded efforts, with the cancellation of all of its older chips, used in military and aerospace applications, and the selling off of its applications processor division to Marvell.

Embedded products need high-performance, low-power chips, but also need to be able to buy them for long periods of up to five years, to prevent them having to redesign their space shuttles or cash machines every ten minutes. Which would be bad.

However, Daamit has been seeking now to reassure these customers that they have nothing to worry about:

- The key employees who supported the old Geode chips will still be available, having moved just north to Fort Collins

- Fort Collins will have applications engineering support, product marketing, and embedded software and hardware design support, making reference designs, drivers and BIOSes

- Availability of the current Geode chips is not affected in any way - these will still be available to buy for many years to come.

- They have worked to create a guaranteed supply of chipsets from SiS, with their CX range, which are available for the embedded K7 (Geode NX) and K8 range for as long as the processors are available.

- The amount of work on AMD64 for embedded products, currently limited to the Opteron parts, is going to increase considerably

- A new roadmap for processors, chipsets and GPUs (which ATI also support for embedded products at the moment) is imminent.

So there you go - we'll let you know when we hear what's coming, as the prospect of some low-power integrated GPUs + CPUs will probably have the embedded market drooling. µ