14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's habit of making long-term roadmaps has backfired again, although we doubt it is too concerned about the information that emerges this way, especially when it doesn't concern high-profile products.
The central processing units (CPUs) that got detailed are, or will be, part of the Atom series. Or perhaps it is more accurate to call them system-on-chip devices (SoCs).
They bear the codename “Avoton” and will be paired with the Edisonville platform in the second half of 2013.
Thus, Avoton Atom CPUs will follow in the footsteps of the Centerton collection, which should be out by the end of the year.
Each SoC will have between two and eight cores, with every pair of cores sharing 1 MB of L2 cache memory. Thus, an 8-core Avoton chip will have 4 MB cache.
We don't exactly know why the company is considering such a high core count, especially when the frequency of each will be of up to 2.4 GHz.
Presumably, the 22nm architecture makes it easy to integrate more cores, even alongside everything else of importance.
Speaking of which, the SATA storage interface, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.2/2.0 will be part of the same die as the CPU cores.
To elaborate, devices based on the Edisonville platform, which is based on the Avoton SoCs, will have up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, four SATA II ports (3 Gbps) and two SATA III (6 Gbps). No external controllers will be needed.
PCI Express 3.0 will be absent, but the 2.0 interface will be present and accounted for. Intel is actually going to somehow cram four controllers (16 PCI Express lanes) next to everything else mentioned so far.
Add to that the Turbo Boost technology (2.7 GHz frequency) and these 5 to 20 Watt SoCs could actually make a lasting impression.