AMD Comes Up With Its Own Gizmo

January 25, 2013 by Dave Haynes

If you think the Raspberry Pi $35 is pretty cool and cheap and all that, but also think it’s a bit like running a donkey at The Preakness, AMD has a more expensive nerd-tinkerer gadget that it says is well-suited to low-cost digital signage apps.

AMD has launched the $199 Gizmo board, described as a low-cost computer board that lets developers stay in the familiar world of  x86-based (PC) embedded systems. The 4-inch by 4-inch development board can run a variety of operating systems, including Android, Linux and.

<propeller-head alert!>

Says AMD:

The Gizmo board includes the G-T40E dual-core processor running at 1.0 GHz, combined on a single die with AMD Radeon[TM] HD 6250 discrete-class graphics. The board provides a performance capacity of 52 gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) at less than 10 watts. Custom high- and low-speed edge connectors enable a full range of functions. This unprecedented level of integration between serial and parallel processing offers a power-efficient foundation for high-performance multimedia content delivery across a broad range of embedded designs such as [highlight color=”eg. yellow, black”]digital signage[/highlight], x86 set-top box (xSTB), IP-TV, thin client, information kiosk, point-of-sale, casino gaming, media servers and industrial control systems.

gigaFLOPS???

“Gizmo is an excellent board for the next generation of embedded systems development,” says Kamal Khouri, director of Embedded Products, AMD. “The new board will serve the diverse and growing embedded development community and is especially useful for those wanting to incorporate the advanced capabilities possible by harnessing a heterogeneous architecture. Developers ready to take advantage of a high-performance, full I/O-featured x86 development board will find tremendous value in Gizmo.”

Packaged as part of a development kit, the Gizmo board is available now through something called GizmoSphere.org for $199. The thin includes RAM and a power brick, but you would still need to slap on a hard drive. So in theory you could be rocking with something for sub-$300.

The Intel NUC is $300 barebones, but by the time all is said and done with necessary bits, it is probably double that. AMD says its Gizmo is not just for hobbyists and the company is after real business opportunities.