AMD’s Adelaar graphics chip will deliver cool visuals on … home appliances?

Don’t be surprised if your kitchen appliances show you some astounding 3D graphics in the future. Advanced Micro Devices announced its codenamed Adelaar graphics chip for embedded applications such as digital signs, medical images, and military applications.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD, the No. 2 maker of PC chips behind Intel, announced the AMD Embedded Radeon E8860 graphics processing unit at an event in Nuremberg, Germany. The announcement is part of the continuing trend of how chip makers can pack an enormous amount of computing power into smaller and smaller devices. The tech of the future is just as much going to be reflected in ordinary appliances as it will be in giant data centers.

The card that uses the GPU is based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture that AMD uses in high-end PC gaming devices. The new chip has double the performance of its predecessor and can deliver 3D graphics and 4K video for gaming machines, digital signs, medical imaging, commercial aerospace and conventional military, and other embedded applications.

The chip can process 768 gigaflops, or 33 percent higher than the previous chip. So it can handle complex parallel processing applications like terrain and weather mapping, facial and gesture recognition and biometric and DNA analysis.

“The demand for rich, vibrant graphics and enhanced parallel compute capabilities in embedded systems is greater than ever before, and is expected to continue to grow as we enter the Surround Computing era,” said Scott Aylor, the corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Embedded Solutions, in a statement. “Legacy graphics no longer meet the needs of embedded solutions for today and tomorrow. With unprecedented performance-per-watt, the AMD E8860 GPU addresses the need to drive multi-displays, 3D and 4K content and GPGPU compute across small form factors, harsh environments and mission critical applications.”