AMD adds chips to long life roadmap

AMD'S EMBEDDED CPU DIVISION has announced that two of its Socket S1 CPUs will be available to buy for at least the next five years, under their longevity programme, comparable to the commitment made by Intel's embedded architecture roadmap.

The Turion X2 TL-52, a 1.6GHz, 2x512KB cache chip has a max TDP of 31W, and the Mobile Sempron 3500+ is a 2GHz, 20W single core part. We haven't yet managed to get wind of the costs of these parts.

A neat trick of the Sempron is that OEMs are encouraged to underclock and undervolt it to achieve lower power, fanless states, rather than having to purchase special ULV versions, such as is Intel's business model.

Of course, there's no point having the CPUs available for long life designs without the support of chipsets, and Intel guarantee some versions of their products for an equivalent lifetime.

AMD's long-term support for the Socket S1 platform is provided both by SiS with their extremely frugal 771CX chipset, and DAAMIT themselves with their RS690T.

RS690T will undoubtedly be less power-efficient than the SiS chipset, but is smaller and has the X700-derived core, now known as the X1250, so will have considerably better performance than this, and the Intel equivalents.

However, such devices normally find homes in slot machines, kiosks, and other embedded devices, so low power and high quality graphics, as well as design support and the availability of good reference designs tend to be rather more relevant than who has the highest 3DMark score. µ