Sapphire Technology has begun taking orders for a small form factor (SFF) embedded motherboard with an
AMD Ryzen V1000 APU (accelerated processing unit) running the show. The APU is permanently soldered to the motherboard (meaning users can't swap it out down the line) and combines Zen CPU cores for compute tasks with Vega GPU cores for graphics muscle.
This is far from Sapphire's first foray into the embedded motherboard category using AMD hardware. The company is a close partner with several previous generation motherboards containing system-on-chip (SoC) silicon from AMD. However, the new FP-FP5V is the first one to sport a
Ryzen chip based on AMD's Zen microarchitecture. That also makes it Sapphire's most capable embedded motherboard solution to date.
"Delivering discrete-GPU caliber graphics and multimedia processing, and compute performance up to 3.61 TFLOPS with thermal design power (TDP) as low as 12W and as high as 54W, AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 SoCs equip system designers to achieve new levels of processing efficiency and design versatility," Sapphire says.
The FP-FP5V is a mini-STX board measuring 147.3mm x 129.7mm (5.8 x 5.5 inches). It has two DDR4 SO-DIMM memory slots supporting up to 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory in a dual-channel configuration. For storage, Sapphire's latest embedded motherboard serves up a SATA 6Gbps port and two M.2 slots, one of which can optionally be used to house a Wi-Fi card.
External connectivity consists of three USB 2.0 ports (two at the rear and one at the front), a USB 3.1 Type-C port (front), and a pair of RJ-45 ports powered by Realtek's RTL8111G PCIe Gigabit LAN controller.
The FP-FP5V is not a consumer solution. Instead, it's designed for high resolution visual embedded applications such as electronic gaming machines (slot machines and the such), medical imaging, interactive digital signage, thin clients, point of sale terminals, and so forth.
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Sapphire is making available four different models based on four different Ryzen V1000 series APUs. They include:
- Ryzen Embedded V1807B: 4 cores / 8 threads, 3.35GHz to 3.8GHz, Vega 11, 35-54W TDP
- Ryzen Embedded V1756B: 4 cores / 8 threads, 3.25GHz to 3.6GHz, Vega 8, 35-54W TDP
- Ryzen Embedded V1605B: 4 cores / 8 threads, 2.06GHz to 3.6GHz, Vega 8, 12-25W TDP
- Ryzen Embedded V1202B: 2 cores / 4 threads, 2GHz to 3.6GHz, Vega 3, 12-25W TDP
Prices range from $325 on the lower end to $450 for the top model. Buyers who are interested can order one now direct from Sapphire.