On 9th December 2015, AMD announced that the company achieved a number one market share position for thin clients. It is based on its thin-client shipments. According to sales to thin client customers last year, AMD APU has more than half of the market share. It is about 53% of the total market share. HP, Fujitsu and Samsung are the thin clients customers of AMD
APU
On 21st October 2015, AMD announced new Embedded R-Series SOC processors codenamed as “MERLIN FALCON” that establish performance leadership across a targeted range of embedded application market requirements for digital signage, retail signage, medical imaging, electronic gaming, media storage and communications and networking.
On 29th September 2015, AMD introduced its most powerful line of AMD PRO A-Series mobile and desktop processors (formerly codenamed “Carrizo PRO” and “Godavari PRO”) to deliver exceptional value and performance for today’s challenging workloads. The new line of AMD PRO A-Series processors offer enhanced performance, reliability and opportunity to business users and IT decision makers and are designed for the future with Microsoft Windows 10.
Once again the increase in available transistors provided the opportunity to integrate CPU with GPU into a single device called as “APU”. The close proximity of these two processor types offered the ability to more tightly couple the memory system to enable direct sharing of data structures. Faced with limitations in silicon scaling (maintaining Moore’s Law) and the driving need to improve performance and efficiency, the electronics industry is banding together to change the very nature of computing. This is the transition to “heterogeneous computing” where the various execution units are more tightly integrated and share system responsibility and resources. The critical part of this is elevating the other programmable execution units like the GPU to the same level of the CPU for memory access, queuing, and execution. In other words, rather than having a CPU and various co-processors, these various processor elements can be referred to in combination as “Compute Cores.” Kaveri is the first HSA enabled APU which is based on the concept of Compute cores.
A multi-processor system contains two or more processors.All processors share access to common set of memory modules,I/O channels, and peripheral devices. Inter-processor communication can be done through the shared memory. hUMA is the answer to this sharing of CPU and GPU workloads.
As the name implies, heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor. These are multi-core systems that gain performance not just by adding cores, but also by incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks. simplifying the particular discussion, an APU is a heterogeneous system that incorporates DirectX 11 discrete-level GPU capabilities for graphics processing and other mathematically intensive computations on very large data sets, to handle visual tasks such as 3-D rendering as well as certain functions.