AMD today announced immediate availability of two new AMD Embedded G-Series APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) with thermal design power (TDP) ratings of 5.5 and 6.4 watts, up to a 39 percent power savings compared to earlier versions. The very low power consumption and small 361mm² package is ideal for compact, fanless embedded systems like digital signage, kiosks, mobile industrial devices and many of the new emerging industry-standard small form factors such as Qseven. This is an unprecedented low-power offering for the embedded market that features one or two low-power x86 “Bobcat” CPU cores and a discreet class DirectX 11-capable GPU on a single die.

“We have seen many of our embedded customers deploy fanless systems even with our 15W TDP processors in the past. Today we take the ground-breaking AMD Fusion APU well below 7W TDP and shatter the accepted traditional threshold for across-the-board fanless enablement,” said Buddy Broeker, director, Embedded Solutions, AMD. “System designers can now unleash their creativity without being constrained by heat or size issues.”

Systems based on the new low power AMD Embedded G-Series platform are available now including an industrial mobile device from Amtek, a Pico-ITX single board computer from Axiomtek, a Qseven form factor computer-on-module from datakamp, and a fanless digital signage platform from iBASE.

Though the announcement of G-Series APUs is aimed at industrial devices, but it indicates where AMD is heading. Rather than just depending on raw performance power of CPU cores to compete with Intel, AMD is combining CPU cores with discreet GPU in order to match the performance offered by Intel chips. AMD is behind Intel by a long way when it comes to processor performance, but by taking this approach they can offer price and low power requirement benefits in the lower-end systems. Check out the video below in which AMD describes the APU.