Posted on Monday, October 26 2015 @ 14:36 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
WCCF Tech
also discovered a curious new AMD product in the shipping manifests over at Zauba. The entry in question details a prototype called "Magnum" and mentions an FPGA board as well as "DTV".
The entry in question is a very recent one and reads “PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD ASSEMBLY-AMD MAGNUM FPGA PROTOTYPEBOARD FOR DTV P/N .102-B25432-00 (FOC)”. Although we have heard talk of AMD wanting to dabble in the FPGA side of things this is something even more astonishing – because AMD sold its DTV division back in 2008 to Broadcom. For a little context, DTV stands for Digital Television and AMD was indeed in the DTV business back in the day.
It's a complete mystery what this could be. The site suggests this could perhaps be an NVIDIA Shield equivalent device or a home entertainment box, but given AMD's financial problems it would seem unwise to dedicate a lot of resources to this. Alternatively, another theory suggests it could be a prototype board for a future console. Some previously spotted AMD patents talk about FPGA integration onto Zen APUs, so perhaps that's what's going on with the FPGA in this prototype.
