One area of AMD’s product portfolio that doesn’t get as much attention as the desktop and server parts is their Embedded platform. AMD’s Embedded series has been important for on-the-edge devices, including industrial, automotive, healthcare, digital gaming machines, and thin client systems. Today, AMD has unveiled their latest Embedded architecture, Embedded+, which combines their Ryzen Embedded processors based on the Zen+ architecture with their Versal adaptive SoCs onto a single board.
Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech
Machines with these chips will flood the used market a few years from now, and they’re going to be great buys for all kinds of fun projects – and because the corporate world buys these machines by the truckload, they show up on eBay at impulse prices within years. Sometimes, you can even buy cheap whole lots of these kinds of boxes. They often tend to be a little weird, and come with features and trinkets normal computers don’t come with, which is always good for some weekend fun.
Cathode Ray Dude is currently doing a series on these little things on YouTube, and there’s always something weird to discover about what kind of odd features and design choices these machines possess. If there’s interest from you, our lovely readers, I can see if I can snatch up a few weird ones from eBay and write about what kind of fun projects you can do with these. You can usually run Linux on these, the embedded versions of Windows, and if they’re not too weird, they could probably serve as a cheap Haiku box, too.
I especially like how they “revive” Jetway’s expansion modules for their “industrial” mini-ITX boards (like https://www.jetwaycomputer.com/J7F2.html#daughter_board or https://www.jetwaycomputer.com/NC92.html#daughter_board ). That is a neat move.