AMD-Based Graphics Card Gives High-End Video to Multiple Displays

People may pay the most attention to AMD's ventures on the consumer graphics market, but the company is active in other fields as well, such as embedded computing.

Speaking of embedded computing, the Sunnyvale, California-based company now powers a fairly mighty embedded video card.

This isn't primarily its merit though. After all, it is MEN micro Inc., a worldwide maker of embedded computing and I/O products, that created it.

And by “it” we mean the G214, a 3U CompactPCI Serial multi-display controller board powered by the AMD Radeon E6760 graphics processing unit (GPU).

The GPU works at 600 MHz and supports DirectX 11 graphics (through a programmable 3D engine), and includes a third-generation unified video controller (UVD), for H.264, VC-1, MPEG4 and MPEG2 compressed video stream decoding.

In addition to the above, the card also has 80 processing elements (480 shaders), leading to 576 GFLOPS peak single precision floating point performance (puts ultrasound, radar and video imaging applications to the support list).

All these feature work on up to 35W of energy and MEN micro even made the product capable of withstanding shocks and vibrations. The MTBF is over 150,000 hours.

That said, what makes the board suitable for video surveillance, simulators, professional A/V equipment and digital signage is its output setup.

There are four DisplayPort 1.2 connectors there, each capable of supplying a resolution of 4,096 x 2,560 at 60 Hz and a color depth of 24 bpp.

Should one aim for more, though, a wider front panel can add two more DisplayPorts, although their maximum resolution is 2,560 x 1,600 pixels.

Nevertheless, the real advantage is that, in a standard setup, a single CPU board can control up to seven multi-display boards of this sort. As such, assuming each board has four ports, the total number of panels that the machinery can use at once becomes 28. Said panels can be used independently or together to form one big image.

MEN Micro has given the G214 a price of $1,344, or 1,007 Euro.

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