$89 Sapphire BP-LX210KL Board is Powered by AMD G-Series LX Dual Core Processor

Mentor Embedded will regularly organize webinars to show how to use or leverage their embedded Linux distribution, but their latest upcoming webinar entitled “Deploying Embedded Linux on an AMD LX-based sub-$100 Sapphire LX210 board” caught my eyes simply because there aren’t that many low cost AMD boards. The only ones I can think of are Gizmo 2 board sold for $200, as well as some PC Engines boards starting at $106 and mainly designed for headless applications.

It took me several attempts on DuckDuckGo and Google, before finding Sapphire LX 210 product page. It’s even unclear how the board is called, as the company refers to it as BP-LX210KL at times, and BP-FT3bGS or BP-210KL in other instances. Preliminary specifications:

• SoC – AMD G-series LX210 dual core processor with Radeon GPU supporting DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL.2 manufactured using 28nm process technology
• System Memory – 2x DDR3 SO-DIMM up to 16GB (Non-ECC)
• Storage – 1x mSATA
• Video Output – Dual HDMI outputs with support for 2 simultaneous (independent) displays
• Audio – Via HDMI, 1x combo audio jack
• Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet via Realtek RTL8111F PCIe chip
• USB – 2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports
• Expansion – 1x mini PCIe slot
• Misc – RTC with battery
• Power Supply – 19V/3.42A
• Dimensions – 100 x 100m (4″ x 4″)

BP-LX210KL is said to be “ideal” for very cost sensitive applications like thin clients, POS terminals, media players, digital signage, kiosks and industrial displays. Two versions of the board are available:

• 52053-25-40G – Motherboard with heatsink, driver DVD, quick installation guide, Mentor Linux postcard?, and Mentor Linux document
• 52053-26-40G – Same as above plus 4GB DDR3 @ 1600 MHz,  19V/3.42A power supply, US type power cord, and 16GB USB pen drive

The company is serious about cooling with that very large heatsink, so I wonder what kind of TDP the processor has.. There’s no actual “AMD LX210KL” processor that I could find, so I checked AMD G-Series LX product brief, and either that’s a new unannounced processor, or they are using AMD GX-210KL dual core processor shown in the table below.

However, that’s a 4.5W TDP SoC so the heatsink seems to be quite oversized, and the max DDR3 speed is 1333 MHz, so maybe it could be a new SoC from LX family after all. They’ll provide an overview of the board in the webinar on July 19th, so we’ll certainly know more at that time.

The price of the board is said to be $89 only, to which you’d need to add you own storage and memory. G-Series LX family is an update to AMD Geode LX family, so you should not expect mazing performance, but the price, and I/Os still make it an interesting board.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.