According to leading analysts, the market for
IoT appliances will grow to 26 billion installed
appliances by 2020. In comparison to 2009, this
represents a 30-fold increase and a CAGR of
approximately 40 percent. Note that these im-
pressive numbers are on top of all the consumer
tablets and smartphones, which are predicted
to reach just 7.3 billion by 2020. The result: IoT
appliances will be ubiquitous. What, however,
makes previously dumb devices IoT ready?
They need built-in processor intelligence that
is freely programmable and connected. Fur-
thermore, they need to support remote man-
agement functionalities as well as autonomous
collection, monitoring, and provisioning of
data features which help OEMs and operators
to increase both the productivity and efficiency
of their applications. And these improvements
are supposed to result in 1.9 trillion US dollars
of additional value-adding sales into diverse
vertical markets. Clearly, IoT will be a game
changer in many different markets. And there
are certain markets that will benefit most heavily
from this new technology trend.
The top vertical growth markets for IoT appli-
ances include first smart factories. IoT will
help to increase productivity and reduce in-
ventory costs together with savings in the pro-
duction and supply chain processes. The second
growth market is retail with intelligent
POS/POI and digital signage applications be-
cause IoT appliances will transform how oper-
ators engage with customers, analyze their be-
havior, and optimize the impact of their inter-
actions. Healthcare and patient monitoring is
another growth market. IoT will enable better-
connected devices and data-driven patient
management, resulting in improved healthcare
effectiveness and efficiency. Last but not least,
professional distributed gaming will enhance
gaming and entertainment experience with re-
mote collaboration, rich media, and on-de-
mand programs.
Additionally, with all
the data generated
and distributed by de-
centralized IoT appli-
ances, Ethernet pow-
ered smart storage de-
vices can enable the
corresponding distrib-
uted cloud storage in-
frastructure to achieve
highest flexibility in
terms of management
while improving I/O
performance, data re-
covery time, and cost
per gigabyte of cloud
storage.
A key enabler for all these new decentralized
IoT appliances is the right processor technology
platform to lend the devices intelligence and
connectivity. To achieve lowest R&D costs, the
platform should be standardized and should
also deliver all the required interfaces in the
form of standard building blocks. Furthermore,
it is imperative that these standard platforms
can be freely programmed. In order to be able
to execute smaller as well as more complex
tasks it should also be scalable to embrace out-
standing computing performance and increased
AMD SoC-based congatec boards -
accelerating IoT appliance development
C
OVER
S
TORY
By Zeljko Loncaric,
congatec
Gartner foresees that
the number of IoT appliances
will explode to around 26 billion
units in 2020. And all these new
installations will require smart
embedded SoCs. congatec
pre-integrates AMD Embedded
G-Series SoCs on a broad spectrum
of embedded form factors, helping
to accelerate the design
of all these new appliances.
June 2014
6
Figure 1. AMD Embedded G-Series SoC
