The AMD Ryzen V2000 series is being quietly launched today. Unlike the Ryzen V1000 and EPYC 3000 series, we are not getting a lot of fanfare with this one. The embedded market moves slowly. As a great example, the mainstream server market has been on Zen 2 since the July 2019 EPYC 7002 “Rome” launch. The consumer market has just moved to Zen 3 (servers will follow with the EPYC 7003 “Milan” shortly thereafter.) After all of this, the embedded market will get Zen 2 via the AMD Ryzen V2000 series with a twist.
AMD Ryzen V2000 Embedded SoCs
The new AMD Ryzen V2000 Embedded series offers up to eight Zen 2 cores, Radeon graphics, and 20 PCIe Gen3 lanes.
Here is the AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 series product stack which encompasses four SKUs. One will quickly notice that all of the SKUs have configurable TDPs with the V2748 and V2546 being the higher TDP and higher clock units. The V2718 and V2516 are the lower power and lower clock units but all options are 6 cores / 12 threads or 8 cores / 16 threads which is actually a nice bump in this space that has been dominated by quad-core parts.
AMD basically is showing that one can upgrade to these parts except at the very low power segment under 10W TDP.
For the customers, we see many embedded solutions providers. These are not the same segment as the TinyMiniMicro nodes made by Dell, HP, and Lenovo. You can learn more about the TinyMiniMicro segment in Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution.
Two features we wanted to call out are the 10-year availability. To our readers, that means that Zen 2, a 2019-era architecture, will still be running strong in 2030. That is why the embedded market is completely different from the desktop or server markets. We also wanted to point out that PCIe Gen3, introduced with Sandy Bridge Xeons in the server space, will be over 28 years old by the time these chips are no longer available from AMD.
Final Words
AMD often targets parts like these for systems that need basic graphics acceleration whether that is in some sort of encoding/ decoding capacity or simple graphics for games. Still, it is great to see AMD stepping up with a new part even if it is still Gen3 when the children born in 2012 when Gen 3 was being rolled out will be adults by the time these new PCIe Gen3 parts are retired.
Now we just need an EPYC 3003 series!
Cool! Kontron just started to release their V1000 boards. Embedded world indeed!
BTW: 10-year availability means 10-year of possibility to purchase new CPUs from AMD for the boards and due to life-time probably another 10-20 years of hardware run in the field. So PCIe gen3 will be truly retired looong time after it’s not available for the purchase…
Let’s add some perspective here: PCIe Gen 2 is still predominant in low power embedded systems (ARM, Intel Celeron, etc.)
Totally true domih. But also 9-10 years from now, PCIe Gen3 will not be a single generation behind like Gen2 is today.
Here’s hoping that someone (Supermicro?) comes out with a good board for this so I can replace my aging Xeon-D 1500.
right now I can only find mb with form factor 4×4 or 5×5.
Which is good for a kiosk or thiclient, or industrial pc, but not for a NAS
too many little room on the nuc-like form factors for what a NAS needs (SATA ports, ngff nvme, full pci-exp slot, etc)