AMD unveiled today the new AMD Alchemy Solutions DBAu1000, DBAu1500 and DBAu1100 development board kits for its AMD Alchemy Solutions processor family. These new development board kits will assist customers in product development and in reducing time to market.

The AMD Alchemy Solutions development board kits are integrated hardware and software systems that leverage the high performance, low power AMD Alchemy Solutions Au1000, Au1500, and Au1100 processors. These MIPS technology-based, highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SOC) processors offer as much as 400MHz at 250milliwatts - and are suitable for a broad variety of non-PC Internet appliance applications. Such devices include automotive navigation/entertainment systems, computing devices such as web tablets and PDAs, home and small office networking and access devices such as gateways, routers and firewalls, and gaming devices.

The development board kits are turnkey solutions that integrate processors, memory and peripherals onto a single board, along with debugging assist features and software. These board kits allow developers to test the Au processor family in a variety of demanding applications.

Specific hardware and software features vary slightly from board kit to board kit, but include:

• 64MB SDRAM;
• 32MB AMD MirrorBit Flash Memory;
• AMD 10/100 Ethernet PHY(s);
• USB host/device connectors;
• RS232 connectors;
• Hot swappable PCMCIA slots;
• Interface to static memory bus;
• LED's for system activity and software debug;
• EJTAG connections to the processor;
• Yamon boot monitor and debugger;
• Windows CE .NET, VxWorks, and embedded Linux demonstration images;
• Hardware design files;
• Quick start guide.

The development board kits are immediately available at $1995 each.

Well, if AMD had supplied these development kits for free, they would have been much more AMD Alchemy developers around. Just try to recall the year 1999 when a lot of game developers made their games for 3dfx graphics cards only. And then go back in the year 2000, when NVIDIA gave loads of developers their graphics cards. What do we have now? Almost every new game is developed on NVIDIA GPU, for NVIDIA GPU and is very often run at NVIDIA GPU-based graphics card. Great strategy, isn’t it? In fact, ATI now tries to do the same thing.