A little over a year after launching its first Ryzen Embedded processors, chip maker AMD is expanding the family. The new Ryzen Embedded R1000 chips are based on the same Zen architecture as last year’s V1000 series processors. But the company says they offer more bang for the buck for device makers looking for a low-power, high-performance solution.

Basically, the first Ryzen Embedded R1000 chips are 14nm, dual-core chips with Radeon Vega 3 graphics. They’re a little less powerful than quad-core V1000 series chips, but they can still output video to three 4K displays at once and AMD says the new chips are 3 times better performance-per-watt than the previous-gen R-series embedded chips, code-named “Merlin Falcon.”

The first boards featuring Ryzen Embedded R1000 chips are set to ship by June, with devices from OEMs powered by the new chips coming this fall.

Ryzen Embedded chips are largely designed for industrial and enterprise systems including thin clients, medical gear, casino game systems, and the like. But we’ve seen a handful of products aimed at the consumer/prosumer/maker space including the Udoo Bolt single-board PC and the upcoming Smach Z handheld gaming PC, both of which use V1000 series chips.

So what kind of devices can we expect to use AMD’s new cheaper, lower-performance R1000 series chips? Well one device that’s already been announced is the Atari VCS retro game console/PC.

Atari revealed last month that it would be using an unnamed AMD Ryzen chip. Now we know it’ll be a Ryzen R1000 processor.

Other companies planning to release R1000 hardware include ASRock, Advantech, SCALA, zSpace, Axiomtec, and Quixant, just to name a few.

AMD’s Ryzen Embedded R1000 family will have two processors at launch:

  • R1606G – 2.6 GHz base / 3.5 GHz boost / 1.2 GHz GPU
  • R1505G – 2.4 GHz base / 3.3 GHz boost / 1 GHz GPU

Both chips are 14nm processors with support for a 12 watt to 25 watt TDP and both are dual-core, quad-thread chips with 1MB of L2 cache, 4MB of L3 cache, support for DDR4-2400 RAM, and support for dual 10Gb Ethernet jacks.

AMD released a limited set of benchmark results, suggesting that the chips can outperform a 15 watt Intel Core i3-8145U Whiskey Lake processor in 3DMark11 and Cinebench R15 tests.

Now that AMD is starting to ship 12nm laptop chips based on the company’s newer Zen+ architecture, it strikes me a bit odd to see the company expanding its embedded chip lineup with a processor that uses last year’s architecture and offers less performance than last year’s chips.

But AMD says it’s looking to expand its produce lineup by offering a new lower-cost, lower-performance solution that’s pin compatible with its existing embedded chips. We will likely see next-gen Ryzen Embedded chips based on newer architecture next year.

For now, the company says its expanded line of embedded chips offer advantages over Ryzen Mobile laptop chips for developers of certain devices including a longer support lifecycle (AMD will offer 10 years of availability and support for these chips), broader Linux support, and enhanced security features.

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12 replies on “AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 line of 14nm, dual-core chips”

  1. The UDOO has a cpu fan, desktop cpu style but smaller. That really isnt “embedded”. Ideally, a DRAM stick sort of passive cooling system would be great. Better yet, a DRAM form factor APU concept would be amazing.

  2. I wonder if we’ll see any quad-core products. I would be interested in something like a NUC, but powered by an APU with CPU performance similar to an i5 U-series, and GPU performance higher than Intel offers.

  3. By the way, speaking about Ryzen Embedded, has anyone seen UDOO BOLT? Wasn’t that supposed to be shipped at the end of last month?

  4. This looks like AMD trying to oust Intel from the lower end of the performance stack. Not the bottom (Core my*, formerly known as Atom), but the level above that. If AMD can walk over Intel in several categories of price:performance (And even raw performance in handpicked tasks, as their benches demonstrate) they have a larger market to pour Zen into.

    The work to optimize for embedded – Is that why it’s last years’ chips? Without more TDP information it’s hard to guess what they’ve binned these from.

    1. The Core M products have nothing to do with the Atom line. They weren’t “formerly known as Atom”. They are 2 different product lines that were built using completely different microarchitectures

      1. Grant, you are correct. I meant this from a market segmentation perspective. But I did more digging and found that even rhetorically (for market purposes) I am wrong. Core M is definitely different from Atom – But then today’s Atom is an SOC rather than a CPU as the original Atoms are.

        At release, the Core M (M3, M5, MY) were slid into the performance gap between the Atom and Core i* series. At that time the Atom processor was very much not a SOC ( https://www.memory4less.com/images/products/img0922g/2013/hpmotherboardssystemboardsthinclient.jpg Atom N280 motherboard). The current Atom is an SOC used in tablets rather than a CPU for a motherboard. The changing market towards more compute capacity used for pretty transparencies, along with a manufacturing shift towards SOCs, and the Core M chips are definitely still in between performance of Core i and Atom chips.

        1. At the time the first Core M was released, the Atoms were already SoCs starting from the Clover Trails and then later the Bay Trails. With the release of these new Ryzen SoCs, despite reduced core count and graphic cores still have not seen any 6W and below. The Pentium 4415Y inside the Surface Go is 6W for example.

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