AMD has reaffirmed its commitment to the embedded market, announcing two new low-power, single-core processors. Compatible with the company's AM2 socket, the AMD Athlon 64 processor Models 2000+, 2600+, and 3100+ feature power envelopes of 8, 15, and 25 Watts, respectively.

(Click here for larger view of the Athlon 64 chip)

All three chips are built on the company's 65-nanometer manufacturing process, and have clock speeds ranging from 1 to 2 GHz. Each of them offers 512 KB of second-level cache.

The new processors mark the latest phase in AMD's continuing program of repurposing its mobile processors for use in the embedded market. Earlier this year, the company similarly released the Turion 64 X2 line.

As before, the parts are said to be covered by the AMD64 Longevity Program. This means the chips have lengthy design and qualification cycles, and AMD will keep them on the market for at least five years, the company says.

According to AMD's announcement, the Athlon 64 2000+, 2600+, and 3100+ support ECC memory for high-reliability applications. AMD claims these processors are “especially applicable for systems such as Network Attached Storage (NAS), Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs) for the telecommunications market, and various single board computing and industrial implementations.”

The new chips pay homage to the fact that embedded applications are requiring steadily more computing power. Initially, AMD's embedded x86 processor offerings, such as the Geode processors introduced in 2003, had dwelt in the lower end of the market.

In its announcement, AMD noted that it has introduced more than a dozen products in its Embedded Solutions family this year, and plans to “continue the push … well into the future.” The quad-core Opteron processor introduced earlier this month is a candidate for Embedded Solutions status in the future, the company hinted, as is the recently discussed “Bobcat” family of processors destined to compete with Intel's Menlow parts in MIDs and UMPCs.

Intel's x86 processors currently enjoy a performance edge over AMD parts in many areas. One exception may be support for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit application such as multimedia editors, since the AMD64 instruction set reached market well before x86_64.

AMD did not announce pricing for the new processors, but said they will be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year.

 
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