Posted on Wednesday, December 07 2011 @ 22:08 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
VR Zone has details about Centerton, a new Atom SoC from Intel that aims to repel the rising threat of ARM-based chips in the server market. You can learn more about it
over here.
The Centerton chip itself is a simple dual-core 32 nm 64-bit CPU. It contains just two 'Saltwell' multithreaded 1.6 GHz Atom cores with 512 KB L2 cache each, a single-channel DDR3-1333 ECC low voltage memory controller for up to 8 GB on a single SO-DIMM, and 8 PCIe v2 lanes, with legacy I/O and SMbus included on-die as well. This removes the need for any sort of chipset. Simply, just use PCIe v2 lanes to attach what you really wish, like a Gigabit Ethernet, storage controllers like SAS, InfiniBand or even one of those PLX PCIe v2 switches to let multiple processors talk to each other directly over PCIe itself at ultra low latency!
With this kind of compact footprint, we are talking about just 5W to 8W total TDP for the whole system on a chip (SoC), and an enormously efficient footprint with CPU modules just about the size of a credit card! And this is a chip with full memory RAS features including scrubbing; with full virtualisation implemented as well, and 64-bit address space.
