AMD’s Ryzen V3000 targets Intel’s embedded chips • The Register

AMD on Tuesday targeted Intel’s low-power Xeon D and industrial Core series processors with the launch of its Ryzen Embedded V3000 CPUs.

The chips are designed for embedded devices, with AMD specifically targeting data center storage and networking devices.

AMD Expectations Its chips are twice as fast as the V1000 series chips when you increase the number of cores and memory bandwidth. The chipmaker also attributes much of the performance improvement to using its latest Zen 3 architecture. Of course, these new chips are being juxtaposed with a five-year-old architecture – conveniently ignored Ryzen V2000s.

AMD’s Ryzen embedded processors have typically lagged behind their other mainstream desktop and data center chips, architecturally, by at least a generation. When AMD launched its V2000 series chips in 2020, they got the Zen 2 cores.

However, as we’ve seen with AMD’s line of notebooks, the company has no problem putting older cores in new processors. When the chipmaker refreshed its embedded R2000 chips in June, “updated” she on his now 4 year old Zen+ architecture.

The initial V3000 series includes five processors with four, six or eight cores. However, the key differentiator is their thermal design power, which ranges from 10W to 54W depending on the SKU. And like most embedded processors, they are unsocked. Instead, the ball grid array chips are permanently attached to the motherboard – think single board computers, embedded devices, and so on.

All five chips support DDR5 ECC memory, up to 20 PCIe Gen 4 lanes, dual 10Gbps Ethernet and can operate in temperatures up to 105°C. However, unlike AMD’s V1000 or V2000 chips, the V3000 series doesn’t appear to offer onboard graphics in its original lineup.

Here’s a full breakdown:

• V3C48: 8 cores / 16 threads, with a base clock of 3.3 GHz, a boost clock of 3.8 GHz, a configurable TDP of 35-54 W and 20 MB of total cache.
• V3C44: 4 cores / 8 threads, with a base clock of 3.5 GHz, a boost clock of 3.8 GHz, a configurable TDP of 35-54 W and 10 MB total cache.
• V3C18I: 8 cores / 16 threads, with a base clock of 1.9 GHz, a boost clock of 3.8 GHz, a configurable TDP of 10-25 W and 20 MB of total cache.
• V3C16: 6 cores / 12 threads, with a base clock of 2 GHz, a boost clock of 3.8 GHz, a configurable TDP of 10-25 W and 19 MB of total cache.
• V3C14: 4 cores / 8 threads, with a base clock of 2.3 GHz, a boost clock of 3.8 GHz, a configurable TDP of 10-25 W and 10 MB total cache.

While the core counts, cache configuration, and TDPs invite comparison to AMD’s Ryzen mobile processors, they don’t match the chipmaker’s 5000- or 6000-series parts.

AMD plans to offer the platform, which is now shipping to ODMs and OEMs, for “up to” 10 years.

Whether AMD’s V3000 chips will be enough to erode Intel’s longstanding presence in the embedded and edge computing markets remains to be seen. As we discovered in June, although AMD has offered Ryzen and Epyc processors for embedded environments for a number of years, the chips have not found widespread acceptance in mainstream OEM devices. ®