What’s New? CPU shortage, AMD market shares & eMMC for IPCs

19.11.2018

As the year draws to a close, we would like to introduce you to a few important topics that we will be facing next year. Firstly, we explain the problems with Intel CPUs. We also introduce you to AMD Ryzen and eMMC.

Intel's CPU problem remains

In our last "What's New?" article, we reported on the general shortage of electronic components. However, this mainly affected DRAM memory chips and MLCC capacitors. Now Intel CPUs are also affected.

What's New? | spo-comm

In a statement, Intel's CEO announced that the company had not expected demand to be as high as it is currently. As a result, the electronics industry is currently suffering from an enormous shortage of almost all 6th generation CPUs, 7. and 8th generation. This has resulted in immense price increases.

What happens next is still uncertain. At spo-comm, we try to cushion the price increases as best we can, in your interest as well as ours. We advise our customers to discuss planned projects with us as soon as possible.

AMD Ryzen gains market share

In the third quarter of 2018, AMD continued to gain market share in the x86 processor segment, increasing it to over 10 percent. The Group is growing even more significantly, particularly in the area of mobile processors. Here, the share grew by a full 4.1 percentage points to almost 11%. AMD also has an impressive market share of 13 percent when it comes to desktop PCs.

Source: heise

eMMC: Learning how to save space from a smartphone

Where some time ago only the classic HDD hard disk was available, there are now various alternatives to choose from. The best known of these is probably the SSD (Solid State Disk). In this article, we explain exactly what the difference is between these two types of hard disk drives.

In the meantime, the so-called "eMMC" is also being talked about more and more frequently. But what is it actually? eMMC stands for "Embedded Multi Media Card", which means "Embedded Multimedia Card". This is a storage medium based on the MMC standard. Thanks to the energy and space savings and the technical similarity to the SD card, it is mainly used in compact, mobile devices.

Although the storage capacity of eMMC is only 16 GB to 128 GB, the price is significantly lower than that of SSDs. If you compare an eMMC hard disk with an HDD hard disk, the advantages of the eMMC are particularly evident when transferring 4K blocks.

Source: Wikipedia, SearchStorage or more info on ComputerWeekly

Our new spo-book BOX N4100 system, which will be launched next week, is also equipped with 32 GB of eMMC flash memory. Thanks to its HDMI and DisplayPort video output, this mini PC can be used as a digital signage player for simple 4K applications.