Intel releases Avoton soc for microservers in 2013

Intel has unveiled a new Atom soc for small servers. The Avoton is produced at 22nm, will contain Intel’s 3D Tri-Gate transistors and should succeed the Centerton system on a chip, which will be released in the second half of this year.

Intel sees a growing market for servers with small, economical chips and is pushing forward modified Atoms, in addition to its Xeon chips, for so-called micro-servers. Jason Waxman, of Intel’s Cloud Infrastructure Group, showed a new roadmap featuring the Atom Avoton at a conference in San Francisco.

This system on a chip should go into production in 2013 and will be based on 3D Tri-Gate transistors, which Intel also uses for Ivy Bridge, and just like that processor generation, Avoton will be produced at 22nm. In addition, the first more powerful Xeons based on the new Haswell architecture should go into production in 2013. With this, Intel serves both sides of the market for brawny and wimpy cores, i.e. powerful computing cores versus economical cores. Waxman demonstrated among other things that a server node with an Atom Centerton with some optimizations is able to serve web pages at a consumption that is lower than 9W.

He also confirmed that the Centerton is scheduled to appear in the second half of this year. Centerton is a 1.6 GHz dual core with HyperThreading support, with the NM10 platform controller hub integrated on the chip. The tdp is 6W and there is support for 64bit, hardware virtualization and error correcting code memory.