New AMD Versal SoCs Deliver Big Bandwidth Wins Via On-Package LPDDR5X

Many of our regular readers are probably familiar with AMD's Versal series of "adaptive system on chips," but for the uninitiated, Versal is primarily AMD's family of FPGAs. Calling them that is a bit reductive, however. They're hyper-specialized mega-chips that integrate a large and fast Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with Arm CPU cores, network controllers, PCI Express, CXL, and their own memory interface. A revised version of the second-generation chips brings the memory on-package, too.


AMD's Versal chips have a lot of capabilities that simply don't apply to common consumer PC use cases. That's not what they're for, though. Versal chips are used in embedded applications like the automotive world, aerospace and defense, and the telecom industry, where their unique capabilities serve purposes that conventional "application processors" never could, at least, not with the same level of performance and efficiency.


That context established, today's news is that the high-end Versal Premium Gen 2 devices will soon come in a Memory On Package form that integrates LPDDR5X memory directly onto the processor package. AMD says that these models will support up to 32GB of memory, and deliver some 288 GB/second of memory bandwidth, which translates to an impressive 9 GT/s memory clock on a 256-bit bus. According to AMD, this design reduces the required board area in final designs by as much as 60% versus the same chips with discrete memory, which is a big deal in the kinds of applications where Versal gets used.


This is, of course, the exact same packaging philosophy we've seen sweeping the consumer space with chips like Apple's M-series or Intel's Lunar Lake, but while consumer chips do it to make laptops thinner and more power-efficient, AMD is deploying it here to survive the brutal physical constraints of the industrial world. AMD also promises a massive 15-plus-year support lifecycle for the platform, which is a non-negotiable requirement for things like cellular towers or military hardware that can't just be pulled down for a motherboard swap when an external RAM supplier goes out of business.

Outside of the new memory trick, these parts remain absolute connectivity monsters, packing hardwired support for PCIe Gen 6 and CXL 3.1 to push data at a blistering 64Gb/s when paired up with beefy AMD EPYC server CPUs. There's also a ton of built-in hardware encryption to keep data safe from physical tampering out in the wild. If you happen to be in the market to build an advanced radar tracking station or a next-gen telecommunications grid, the standard Gen 2 Versal chips are already out and shipping today, but AMD says these new space-saving Memory-on-Package flavors will start sampling to partners at the end of 2026, with full production scheduled to spin up in the second half of 2027.