AMD today announced the availability of the T40E and T40R, 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. The APUs feature one or two low-power x86 "Bobcat" CPU cores and a discreet class DirectX 11-capable GPU on a single die.

The T40E combines a 1.0GHz, 64-bit dual-core x86 CPU, a Direct X 11-capable GPU, integrated 64-bit memory controller and high-performance I/O with a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of only 6.4 watts. The T40R model has the same features, minus one CPU core, and reduces the TDP to 5.5 watts. The corresponding controller hub (which supplies the PC I/O) comes in at just a couple watts more, yielding achievable complete system power levels under 10 watts.

The GPU core has two SIMD engines with 40 logic units each for a total of 44 Gigaflops of processing power. We?re talking about scores above 1800 on 3DMark ?06 for the AMD C-50 processor ? which has the same graphics engine as the embedded APU. New developments around OpenCL have also opened up new applications for the GPU as a parallel processing unit with floating-point performance well beyond what typical x86 CPU cores can achieve. With hardware functions like the Universal Video Decoder, ayou also get support for two streams of HD video (H.264/VC1/MPEG2) with low overhead to the CPU cores.

Systems based on the new low power AMD Embedded G-Series platform include 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.