Intel Atom S ''Centerton'' Specs Leaked

[Guest]

Intel's Atom S processor has made a first appearance in processor specification tables.

Intel Atom S ''Centerton'' Specs Leaked : Read more

 

[aicom]

This could be really cool with Haswell cores supporting TSX.

 

[Grass Peer]

[citation][nom]aicom[/nom]This could be really cool with Haswell cores supporting TSX.[/citation]
How? What do you mean?

 

[aicom]

[citation][nom]Grass Peer[/nom]How? What do you mean?[/citation]

Sorry, I meant the whole many low-power core server idea. TSX makes that significantly more efficient by reducing locking overhead.

 

[Guest]

These Centerton's are made to push ARM out of the server market. ARM has slow memory interfaces and doesn't address large amounts of memory (32-bit processors). With software compatibility at stake, Intel probably staves off ARM on the server side... for now. The game will change in 2014 when ARM gets 64-bit cores though and Windows ports a full server side OS to ARM. Of course, by then, Intel might have Silvermont cores at 14nm (out of order instruction, better feature integration, better FPU, etc.).

 

[teh_chem]

Is hyperthreading useful for servers? I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to server things.

 

[bison88]

[citation][nom]teh_chem[/nom]Is hyperthreading useful for servers? I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to server things.[/citation]


It can be extremely useful. Just remember a server is a glorified PC that is meant to do a certain task very well. It can even do multiple tasks well, but it really depends on what you're using that server for to determine whether or not it'll offer significant boosts with HT or not.

 

[dalethepcman]

Centertron atom? What a horrible name, its like a Celeron and an Atom had a baby, and the baby was put into a laptop with Centrino wireless.

While I appreciate the small thermal envelope, will these allow a higher density and higher performance per watt than a low power Xeon? Unless these can perform at 60% of the performance of the LC3518 Xeon, or until you can pack 8-16 of these into a blade then I don't see the point in a server environment.

 

[deksman]

Why are these commercial companies always making such a mess of this?

Wouldn't it be easier to say... downclock an existing Ivy Bridge to much lower performance?
Say... 1GhZ per core, and do the same to the IGP and automatically lower the TDP to really low levels?
Maybe they can even throw out some of the 'features' that no one really uses and limit cache.

Anything to get the power envelope down to under 10W and use that in smartphones?

Tablets can get away with the same, or a bit larger power envelope.

Of course... none of that would even approach electronics made from a combination of synthetic diamonds and graphene (which would in smartphone form probably come close to the power a supercomputer at currently low power envelope).

Sigh... usage of silicon (inferior material).

 

[razor512]

@deksman

while you can downclock an ivy bridge chip to save power, you eill nrver get it down to those levels, it has too many transisters and even at a very low clock speed, there is a minimum voltage tha the CPU can handle before becoming unstable. It just isn't designed for really low power usage.

 

[rebel1280]

[citation][nom]Grass Peer[/nom]How? What do you mean?[/citation]
Here is VERY in depth write up on it:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6290/making-sense-of-intel-haswell-transactional-synchronization-extensions

 

[warezme]

atom processors will forever but stuck at 1.6 to 2.0Ghz.

 

[rantoc]

Knew this would come, yet peeps voted down the idea to pack a bunch of atoms and here we are...

 

[DavidC1]

[citation][nom]deksman[/nom]Why are these commercial companies always making such a mess of this?Wouldn't it be easier to say... downclock an existing Ivy Bridge to much lower performance?Say... 1GhZ per core, and do the same to the IGP and automatically lower the TDP to really low levels?Maybe they can even throw out some of the 'features' that no one really uses and limit cache.Anything to get the power envelope down to under 10W and use that in smartphones?Tablets can get away with the same, or a bit larger power envelope.Of course... none of that would even approach electronics made from a combination of synthetic diamonds and graphene (which would in smartphone form probably come close to the power a supercomputer at currently low power envelope).Sigh... usage of silicon (inferior material).[/citation]

Of course you can do it, but its less optimal than it can be. Die sizes will be too big, lowering margins(or increasing price), for one thing, and you need to lower the clock drastically to achieve such power use. That's besides the real world issues that Razor512 nicely explained.

Optimizing for a specific segment(when everything else is equal) always results in a better product. That is true for everything in life. You can't expect someone to do everything best for example.

 

[idroid]

crap and more crap....

 

[ProDigit10]

I wasn't too happy about the N2600's bus transfer speeds! I doubt anything below the 2GHZ will be fast enough to transfer at full USB speeds.

 

[xyster]

It is really nice having a dedicated server instance of my own up on Amazon web services; even if it is rather a low-powered machine. I could see the appeal then for a datacenter full of micro-servers like these - cheap mass cloud computing for simple tasks. ie; video streaming.

 

[army_ant7]

Centertron atom? What a horrible name, its like a Celeron and an Atom had a baby, and the baby was put into a laptop with Centrino wireless.

I was actually thinking just a mashup of Celeron and Centrino. (Possibly because I didn't know they were too different things, i.e. confused the words, during a time when I was less entrenched in this stuff.) Hehehe...