AMD 2009 Annual Report Download - page 16

mobility, low power and small form factor. Customers of our embedded products include vendors in industrial
controls, digital signage, point of sale/self-service kiosks, and casino gaming machines as well as enterprise class
telecommunications, networking and storage systems.
The embedded market has moved from developing proprietary, custom designs to leveraging the industry-
standard x86 instruction set architecture as a way to reduce costs and speed time to market. Emerging
requirements for these systems include: very low power for small enclosures and 24x7 operation, support for
Linux, Windows and other operating systems, and high-performance for increasingly sophisticated applications.
Other requirements include advanced specifications for industrial temperatures, shock and vibration, and
reliability.
Our embedded products include options from the AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon, AMD Turion, and AMD
Sempron processor families; the ATI Radeon graphics processor family; and numerous AMD chipsets. These
products are part of the AMD Longevity Program, which provides for an availability period of five years in order
to support lengthy development and qualification cycles and long-term life of the system in the market.
In June 2009, we introduced two new embedded client products: the dual-core AMD Turion™ Neo X2
processor and the AMD Athlon™ Neo X2 processor. These processors deliver PC-caliber performance in a very
low power envelope with an embedded-friendly ball grid array (BGA) package and are used in traditional
embedded applications such as single board computing and thin client systems, as well as self-service kiosks,
point of sale machines and digital signage. The BGA package helps alleviate potential reliability issues for
systems that are deployed in rugged environments and has a low z-height that we designed to enable thin,
compact enclosures.
In September 2009, we announced a new enterprise-class embedded platform based on the 45 nm Quad-
Core AMD Opteron processor and the new AMD SR5690 chipset, allowing high-end embedded vendors to
enable increased performance-per-watt for edge-of-network systems such as telecom/datacom, storage, and
security servers, and routers and switches. This platform enables increased performance for virtualized and multi-
threaded embedded applications and advanced power management features.
Chipset Market
The chipset sends data between the microprocessor and input, display and storage devices, such as the
keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard drive and CD or DVD drive. Chipsets perform essential logic functions, such as
balancing the performance of the system and removing bottlenecks. Chipsets also extend the graphics, audio,
video and other capabilities of computer systems. All desktop, notebook and server PCs incorporate a chipset. In
many PCs, the chipset is integrated with additional functions such as a GPU. An integrated chipset solution is
commonly known as an IGP (integrated graphics processor) chipset. Chipsets that do not integrate a graphics
core are referred to as discrete chipsets. By eliminating the need for a discrete GPU, IGP chipsets offer a lower
cost solution and in some circumstances can offer reduced power consumption or smaller system form factors. A
majority of desktop and notebook PCs make use of IGP chipsets, while discrete chipsets are used in higher
performance PCs and servers.
Chipset Products
Our portfolio of chipset products includes IGP and discrete chipsets targeting desktop, notebook and
embedded computing segments. In August 2009, we introduced the AMD-785G chipset for notebooks with ATI
Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics. Like their predecessors launched in 2008, these chipsets directly integrate
support for the High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) and Digital Visual Interface (DVI) digital display
standards used in many flat panel monitors and HD televisions.
8