AMD Announces Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs - AI Focused & Newer Arm Cores

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Bavaria for today introducing their Versal Series Gen 2 SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. Today's embargo lift covers the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs.

The new AMD Versal Gen 2 SoCs aim to provide up to 3x higher TOPs per Watt than their first-generation devices. On the CPU side, they tout the "new high-performance integrated Arm CPUs" as up to 10x more scalar compute than earlier Versal SoCs. With Versal coming from their Xilinx acquisition, they continue making use of Arm SoCs and with the Gen 2 SoCs are now using Cortex-A78AE processor cores.

Up to eight Arm Cortex-A78AE application processors are in use along with up ot ten Cortex-R52 real-time processors. There is also Arm Mali-G78AE GPU support for real-time display purposes.

The new SoCs also have an upgraded video codec unit (VCU), DDR5/LPDDR5X memory controllers, 100G multi-rate Ethernet, PCIe Gen5, and other upgrades.

AMD is really focusing on Versal Gen 2 for its AI capabilities moving forward.

The software stack will remain open-sourced focus and employ AMD Vitis AI and other existing components and supporting the likes of TensorFlow, ONNX, and PyTorch.

Versal and the very embedded focus SoCs aren't one of my main focuses at Phoronix so I'll leave this quick overview at that for now. AMD Versal Series Gen 2 silicon samples will begin in H1'2025 followed by evaluation kits in mid-2025 and then production silicon not expected until late 2025.