Platform Management - 2023.2 English

The AMD Versal™ adaptive SoC is a heterogeneous multiprocessor SoC that combines multiple user programmable processors, FPGA, and advanced power management capabilities.

Modern power efficient designs require usage of complex system architectures with several hardware options to reduce power consumption, and usage of a specialized CPU to handle all power management requests coming from multiple sources to power on, power off resources, and handle power state transitions. In addition to power, there are other resources like clock, reset, and pins that need to be similarly managed. The challenge is to provide an intelligent software framework that complies to industry standard (IEEE P2415), and can handle all requests coming from multiple CPUs running different software. AMD has created the platform management to support a flexible management control through the platform management controller (PMC).

The platform management handles several use case scenarios. For example, Linux provides basic power management capabilities, such as CPU frequency scaling, and CPU hot-plugging. The kernel relies on the underlining APIs to execute power management decisions, but most RTOS do not have this capability. Therefore, they rely on user implementation, which is made easier with use of the platform management framework.

Industrial applications, such as embedded vision, advanced driver assistance, surveillance, portable medical, and Internet of Things (IoT) are increasing their demand for high-performance heterogeneous SoCs, but they have a tight power budget. Some of the applications are battery-operated, and battery life is a concern. Others, such as cloud and data center, have demanding cooling and energy costs, not including their need to reduce environmental cost. All these applications benefit from a flexible platform management solution.