Sage shows off Gizmo, a 101.6mm x 101.6mm embedded motherboard with a dual-core AMD G-T40E APU running at 1GHz, Radeon 6250-class graphics running at 280MHz, and 1GB DDR3 memory. The board has a TDP of just 6.4W and promises 52.8 gigaflops of computing performance.
The board is only available as part of the Gizmo Explorer kit for $199. This kit includes the board, a JTAG development tool with a 20-hour trial license, a custom version of the open-source core boot BIOS named SageBIOS, an installation DVD with a 30-day trial of the Sage EDK integrated development environment, a power supply, Ethernet and UsB cables, and a break-out Explorer Board that offers access to GPIO, processor IO, while also providing an LCD micro display, a motor controller and a prototyping area.
The board is also feature-rich as well as powerful: as standard, it includes two USB ports, a single SATA port, line-in, line-out and microphone audio ports, 10/100 Ethernet port, and a VGA output supporting displays up to 1,920x1,080. Two expansion connectors are also provided: a high-speed 64-bit connector offering two PCI Express links, Low-Voltage Differential Signalling (LVDS) display output, an additional SATA port and another USB 2.0 port; a low-speed 36-pin connector offers access to general-purpose input-output (GPIO) capabilities, a fourth USB 2.0 signal, Serial Peripheral Interconnect (SPI), Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM,) analogue-to-digital (AD) and digital-to-analogue (DA) conversion and other features of interest to hardware developers.
In short, the Gizmo is a beast of a compact computer - and the presence of a Radeon-class graphics processor, addressible through the open-source OpenCL application programming interface (API) for GPGPU processing offers significant potential in a tiny package. For those who require yet more power, the board also supports the 1.8GHz T56N - although GizmoSphere has yet to launch a version with this APU in place.
