Intel Supercharges Underwhelming Atom Line with 16 Cores, Pro-Level Features

Megalith

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The company has announced new C3000 Atom chips that include a nifty number of cores for handling higher streams of data, but for Intel’s sake, I hope they don’t have any issues like those that plague the C2000 SoCs. These chips happen to have the RAS feature, which corrects data errors on the fly and prevents networking and storage equipment from crashing. I suppose that is noteworthy because this is something you would normally find on the fancier Xeon chips.

The latest Atom C3000 chips announced on Tuesday have up to 16 cores and are more sophisticated than ever. The chips are made for storage arrays, networking equipment, and internet of things devices. The new chips have features found mostly in server chips, including networking, virtualization, and error correction features. Networking and storage devices don’t require a lot of horsepower, so the low-power Atom chips fit right in. Only a handful of Intel server chips have more than 16 cores, but the number of Atom cores means the chip can handle more streams of data. The Atom C3000 fits right into Intel’s long-term plan to grow in the server, IoT and storage markets.
 
I could see using one of these in my server once my dual socket Westmere EP Xeon L5640 system shits the bed.

As long as they have a decent amount of PCIe lanes it could be a nice virtualization and storage server plafrom, saving a good bunch of power.

Enough time has passed since Westmere that these low end Atom cores probably are competitive with the performance of the 2.27Ghz (2.8 turbo) Westmere cores.
 
Wonder if C3000 suffers from the same LPC errata that the C2000 series has (which makes the board/cpu unbootable)
Code:
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/atom-c2000-family-spec-update.pdf
 
Wonder if C3000 suffers from the same LPC errata that the C2000 series has (which makes the board/cpu unbootable)
Code:
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/atom-c2000-family-spec-update.pdf


Aye, there the rub.

Other than that, if these are affordable, I could easily see using a high core count C3000 as my next server. If my calculations on IPC are correct, it should be faster than my Westmere Xeon based server, and a lot nicer on the power bill.
 
These would be nice if they include all of the SATA controller(s) on the SoC, and not spread across multiple controllers like the last C2000 designs, not to mention some of which suffered and disconnected drives from overheating issues, unfortunately.
 
These would be nice if they include all of the SATA controller(s) on the SoC, and not spread across multiple controllers like the last C2000 designs, not to mention some of which suffered and disconnected drives from overheating issues, unfortunately.
Denverton is based around flex I/O that can be configured between PCIe, SATA, and USB. The C3338 which is the only one fully specified supports up to 10 SATA and up to 10 PCIe. Top end appears to be up to 16 SATA and up to 16 PCIe. The rumor is that Denverton's SATA ports also support port multipliers as well. So in theory, you are looking at upwards of 64/80 SATA end points.
 
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