Shortly after the C2000 debacle Intel now announces their Atom C3000 Processors. The new series is intended for small form factor servers, NAS units and the Internet of Things. Intel will released models scaling from two to sixteen cores.

The listed TDP of these units is less than 10 Watts, rated at 8.5 Watt to be precise. The new SoC will get 1.5 up-to 2.2 GHz clock frequencies and offer support for ECC memory. The SoC can support up-to four 10-Gbit jacks, sixteen sata600 interfaces and four USB 3.0 ports.

The new series is not yet available and will go into production later this year. Little is known as to what models will be released, albeit the Intel ARK shows a dual-core Atom C3338 with Denverton cores fabbed at 14nm. That SoC will get a 1.5 Ghz base frequency and 2.2 Ghz boost. 

Each pair of Denverton cores will have two megabytes of level two cache. The new chips support for up to 128 gigabytes of DDR4-2400 memory and thus include support for 10Gb Ethernet as well as 16 lanes of PCI-Express 3.0 connectivity. Atom C3000 replaces the nagged C2000 chips, which were originally targeted at microservers and networking and storage equipment. The Atom C2000 chips recently ran into trouble with a flaw that could crash servers and networking equipment.

Intel Atom C3000 Key Features

• Thermal design points down to 8.5 watts to enable maximum energy efficiency.
• Enhanced performance from 2 to 16 cores and frequencies from 1.5 Ghz to 2.2 Ghz.
• Built-in hardware virtualization to enable dynamic provisioning of services as communication service providers extend network functions virtualization to the network edge. Now including Intel VT-d.
• Intel x86 64-bit software support for scalable performance and broad application compatibility.
• Integrated Intel QuickAssist technology with up to 20 Gbps of compression/encryption throughput.
• 4 x 10 GbE integrated Intel Ethernet to enable high-speed connectivity to the network.
• Error-correcting code (ECC) memory for data integrity and system reliability through automatic data correction.
• Flexible I/O lanes providing up to 16 SATA 3.0, 16 PCIE3, and 4 USB 3.0.
• Extended temperature range and long-life support for dense network, storage, industrial IoT and autonomous driving environments.
• DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) helps to develop efficient applications for networking workloads.
• SPDK (Storage Performance Development Kit) helps to develop efficient applications for storage workloads.

Intel Atom C3000 Availability

The Intel Atom processor C3000 product family is currently sampling in the first half of 2017 and will move into production by mid-2017.