$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.

Click to Enlarge

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.

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19 Replies to “$89 Sapphire BP-LX210KL Board is Powered by AMD G-Series LX Dual Core Processor”

  1. Looks very interesting. These G-LX series look very similar to the older G-T40E, which were only marginally faster than the good old Geode-LX, but used to suck a lot more power (about 4-5 times more at peak). The Geode LX didn’t even require any heatsink despite being etched in 90nm. From what I remember, the T40E didn’t really need a heatsink as long as you didn’t use the GPU. Given that the G-LX210 is etched in 28nm vs 40nm for its older brother, I suspect the huge heatsink above is overrated and proposed only to cover all use cases with all supported CPUs with the same heatsink. But in fact the huge heatsink comes with a benefit for developers, it serves as a support to put the board on the desk without risking short circuits with stuff lying around!

    With all this connectivity and silence at such a price, this board could easily become popular for a lot of generic use cases, including development.

  2. Hi.

    Lack of sata port is a big turn-down because msata is dying. One could use min pcie-sata cart but that just make it pricier when you could buy up core (that has 64gb built in) for example.

    But nice finding 🙂
    Thank you and have a nice day.

  3. > 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.

    What about every E350 ITX/mATX board people were selling since years?

    – Asus E35M1-I
    – Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3
    – Zotac E350-ITX WiFi

    Or even thin clients like the HP T610 (G-T56N), Dell WYSE Z90D, etc.

    No one is selling and of these new anymore, but you can easily find them on eBay or other sites used for under $100.

    @Greg
    Or just buy a mSATA to SATA adapter? They cost <$2 from AliExpress and give you a SATA port.

    @Willy
    The heatsync is probably sized as such to allow passive convection cooling, since there’s no fan or fan header in the image. Any passively cooled CPU/GPU requires a much larger heatsync than active cooling.

  4. @Greg
    Should be able to use mPCIe to SATA or mSATA to SATA adapter, either one i guess due to space constraints.
    This board looks really good! Where do they ship from and any idea about shipping expenses?

    1. yeah, i did that towards support in DE. Lets see what they reply with. If they ship from DE to Europe, there is hope for us 🙂

  5. @cnxsoft
    ‘Buy cheap, buy twice’. Works surprisingly well most of the times 😉

    If the lower slot is mSATA and the upper is mPCIe then 5 SATA ports in total would be possible here. I’ve one mechanical mSATA to SATA adapter that would fit combined with a SATA cable like eg. CBL7PS-1XFL-90 and there exist mPCIe cards based on Marvell 88SE9215 that provide 4 additional SATA ports.

  6. @xenon
    Officially Mentor Embedded Linux. The processor is based on x86 architecture, so in theory Windows and Linux distribution should be supported. That board is for the embedded market so it’s likely for the B2B market only, not B2C.

  7. Thanks for info.I need win os.
    Just hope,they will sell one pcs,i send to them email order.
    cnxsoft
    Which cheap win board you prefer?

  8. @CNX, you said: “…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.”

    Right up until last April when they closed down there was Soekris Engineering in California who for years made some quite popular x86 based small SBCs that were often used as routers and WiFi APs. If memory serves, most Soekris boards used AMD Geode LX Series chips, which are full x86 compatiple processors.

    http://soekris.com/index.html

    From the Soekris Web site announcement on 24 April 2017:

    “Due to declining sales, limited resources available to design new products, and increased competition from Asia, Soekris Engineering, Inc. has suspended operations in the USA as of today… It has been our pleasure to serve our customers over the last 16 years. We are proud that we provided reliable, low-power communications computers Made in the USA to many markets worldwide.”

    P.S., The AMD Geode GX/LX Series IP was bought in 2003 from National Semiconductor (now owned by Texas Instruments). The Cyrix MediaGX platform was the basis for the Geode Series and was obtain in 1997 when National Semiconductor bought Cyrix Corporation. There’s also an Athlon-derived AMD Geode NX part. There’s lots more on the Geode Series here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)

  9. I haven’t got any reply for my request to support at Sapphire Germany.
    Anyone else able to get in touch with them and got info about whether it’s possible to buy this as a private person and from where?

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