Intel Releases Embedded Atom Socs for Internet of Things

Intel has announced the Atom E3900 series of socs for internet-of-things applications. These are relatively powerful socs that are based on the Apollo Lake platform and are mainly intended for automotive, video and industrial systems.

The chips in the lineup are the Atom x5-E3930-dualcore, x5-E3940-quadcore and x7-E3950-quadcore. These are based on Apollo Lake, which Intel also uses for entry-level PCs, and therefore have Goldmont cores. Intel produces them at 14nm and provides the embedded socs with a flip chip ball grid array package. The TDPs range from 6.5W for the x5 dualcore to 12W for the x7 quadcore.

The socs offer some improvements over the E3800 series, which was still based on Bay Trail. For example, the amount of computing power is 1.7 times higher and there is a more powerful gpu, of the ninth generation. According to Intel, the GPU can handle up to fifteen 1080p30 streams for analysis applications, making the chips suitable for security camera systems. The chips support up to six USB 3.0 ports and four PCI-e interfaces, and there is also a coprocessor for Intel’s Trusted Execution Engine 3.0, including Secure Boot support.

The chips can also handle what Intel calls Time Coordinated Computing or TCC. In combination with the embedded software Linux Yocto, the socs can synchronize the clocks of devices in a network to within 1 µs. This could be useful in robotic production, for example.