Intel Atom Rangeley chip aims at networking and communications market

CPU World published details about Rangeley, an upcoming Intel Atom processor that aims at the networking and communications market. Rangeley will be quite similar to the Atom Avoton processor that's intended for the micro-server market, it will feature two to eight cores, a SoC design and a number of I/O components. One of the unique things in Rangeley though is the Intel Crypto engine.

Expected to be launched in the second half of 2013, Rangeley will come in various SKUs, with TDPs ranging from 7-8W for the low-end parts to 20W for the top-end models. Full details at CPU World.

Rangeley chips are very similar to Avoton processors, except that they add an Intel Crypto engine. Depending on SKU, the parts incorporate from 2 to 8 Atom cores, clocked up to 2.4 GHz. The cores use Silvermont out-of order microarchitecture, that is expected to be up to 35% faster per clock than existing 32nm Saltwell architecture. A list of CPU features, supported by the cores, includes SSE4 and AES instructions, and VT-x virtualization. Each pair of CPU cores share 1 MB L2 cache. The SoC also has a dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, that supports to 64 GB of DDR3-1600 or DDR3L-1600 ECC memory. Other interfaces, integrated on the SoC, are 4 PCI Express 2.0 controllers with x16 lanes total, SATA, Gigabit, USB and legacy I/O. Overall, the SoC has 2 SATA 3 ports, and 4 of each SATA 2, Gigabit and USB 2.0 ports. Legacy I/O includes LPC, UART, SMBus, SPI and general purpose I/O.

New component in the Rangeley SoC is a Crypto engine, that implements Intel QuickAssist technology. This technology supports several ciphers, including 128-, 192- and 256-bit AES, 3DES, DES and Kasumi. It also provides authentication, public key encryption and a random number generator. Performance of the Crypto block is SKU dependent, reaching 10 Gbps for 128-bit AES (1 KB buffer) encryption for a top-end SKU.