September 2016
14
E
mbedded
C
omputing
Graphics power for high-volume
digital signage installations
By Zeljko Loncaric,
congatec
This article highlights
the cooperation of semiconductor,
computer module and display
companies to create powerful digital
signage systems at affordable cost.
Digital signage installations are no longer
restricted to just a few prestigious applications
that require ultimate graphics performance in
order to deliver stunning visuals. These days,
what matters is being able to offer appealing
graphics performance at an attractive price
in order to realize high-volume installations.
The new AMD Embedded G-Series pro-
cessors (codenamed Brown Falcon) and its
attractive price point now open the door for
the mass production of multiple range digital
signage solutions.
When using x86-based embedded SoC graph-
ics, it has to be AMD. There is no question
about this in the embedded community, even
among the fans of other processor makers.
The AMD Radeon graphics is without doubt
the greatest heavyweight compared to sim-
ilar competitive solutions. Scalability up to
high-end gaming graphics, comprehensive
and always up-to-date support of the latest
graphics CODECs, plus wide-reaching efforts
to continually improve the visual experience
of embedded computer applications make the
AMD-R-Series processors the technology of
choice for graphics-rich digital signage appli-
cations.
Perceptual computing, for example, enables
us to interact with a system not just via key-
board, mouse or touch, but also through facial
expressions, gestures and speech. It is there-
fore possible to imagine digital signage solu-
tions that can not only count pedestrians and
recognize gender but also react to perceived
moods. Vending machines might even get
a face allowing customers to speak to it as
if they were served by a kiosk attendant in
person. Many other innovative applications
for digital outdoor advertising (often called
DOOH or Digital Out of Home) are conceiv-
able thanks to such innovative technologies.
This often requires the use of the GPU as a
GPGPU and hence the support of heteroge-
neous system architectures. In this respect too,
AMD leads over competing x86 vendors.
Another key aspect in many digital signage
applications is cost. So what do you do, when
the performance of the currently available
AMD-G-Series processors (Steppe Eagle) is not
enough, but the R-Series processors (Merlin
Falcon) are too expensive? You choose the new
AMD-G-Series processors (Brown Falcon),
because they are designed to fill this perfor-
mance gap. They were developed on the basis
of the Excavator microarchitecture, which is
also used for the new AMD-R-Series SoCs.
AMD has transferred all characteristics that
are relevant for the basic structure and the
overall performance of a system from the
high-end R-Series processors to the new
G-Series processors. However, the feature set
was thinned out in favor of a more cost-effec-
tive design, which also allows for slimmer and
more energy-efficient designs. For example,
the G-Series SoCs support only a dual-core
version of the Excavator microarchitecture.
But thanks to the new boost function, it can
be enhanced with an extra shot of perfor-
mance. This can continue until a specified sur-
face temperature on the die is reached. This
is especially important for single-threaded
applications, commonly found in digital sig-
nage applications - for example in the use of
HTML or other web-based content.
For extremely graphics-rich digital signage
applications, the new graphics of the G-Se-
ries supports two monitors with now up to
4K resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels at 60Hz.
Compared to the previous G-Series, it pro-
vides approximately 30% more performance
and supports the latest 3D features of DirectX
12 and OpenGL 4.4. This is made possible by
the AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) Gener-
ation 3 architecture. While support in the new
G-Series SoCs is limited to a maximum of 4
compute units with 64 execution units each,
this still adds up to 256 execution units. The
G-Series also offers new features for video
streaming, which is very important for digi-
tal signage applications. For instance, hard-
ware-accelerated decoding of the latest and
