There are a few news items from Computex we didn’t cover at the time that I want to visit. The first is Denverton, and how one manufacturer had a relevant beta motherboard on display during the show. Denverton is the successor to Avoton, Intel’s 8-core Atom processor that we’ve seen in the ASRock C2750D4I and other and a variety of NAS and server based ‘card’ solutions (GIGABYTE showed a 46x C2750 server in 2U back at Computex in 2015). Avoton uses eight Bay Trail based cores, while Denverton will use the upgraded Cherry Trail microarchitecture design.

The Denverton based motherboard on show was an ‘early’ sample, offering four DDR4 slots supporting RDIMMs, four SATA breakout ports (for 16 SATA drives, sharing some SoC PCIe lanes), dual 10G SFP+ ports, dual gigabit network ports (via Intel I210), 32GB of eMMC and an Aspeed AST2400 board management controller. A single PCIe 3.0 x8 slot is provided for additional functionality.

The chip at the center of this, after we asked nicely for the heatsink to be removed, is a 1.8 GHz Denverton part built on Intel’s 14nm process using the Airmont Goldmont microarchitecture. The QKP2 code is not yet public it seems, however we were told to expect this board in a 4-to-16 core design within similar power envelopes as the previous generation. Denverton is a new microarchitecture and 14nm die shrink compared to Avoton, so single core performance is expected to be more than a few percent higher but the main advantages of the die shrink will be power consumption per core.

Microarchitecture Node Release Main SoC Name Server Codename
Goldmont 14nm 2016 Apollo Lake Denverton
Airmont 14nm 2014 Cherry Trail Denverton
Silvermont 22nm 2013 Bay Trail Avoton
Saltwell 32nm 2011 Clover Trail
Cedar Trail
Centerton
Briarwood

IDF is currently set for mid-August, and we will have at least a trio of editors there for the ride. At this point in development, we are likely to see some announcements being made towards the Denverton platform. If there is a full release at that time, we should see full specification sheets and pricing. Failing IDF, Supercomputing16 is in November.

Edit: Originally this piece claimed Denverton was Airmont, based on aged information. We have since concluded from multiple sources that it was perhaps originally going to be Airmont, but will now be Goldmont based.

Edit 2 (7/25): Based on a personal miscommunication, we have removed the original motherboard images from this news piece.

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  • osxandwindows - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    GTX 1080 and 1070 review?
    Where is it.
  • xype - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Dunno, you don’t seem to be writing them, then? Why now, if you want them that bad?
  • prisonerX - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Cancelled due to excessive whining.
  • Cygni - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Cancelled due to you touching yourself too much.
  • Alexey291 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link

    Eta early 2018
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    There is no mention of ECC support. I would expect it does, given RDIMM support, but do we know for sure.
  • patrickjp93 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    It does. Avoton did.
  • Communism - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Xeon-D already showed that Intel knows that Atom servers didn't really ever make much sense.
  • icrf - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Agreed. When Intel found that scaling down the bigger Core architecture could get most of the power savings of Atom, Atom's days were numbered, and not just in servers. The only victims here are budget buyers that didn't need the performance but still wanted x86 compatibility. For applications like SATA network storage, moving to Xeon-D just means paying more money for no relevant gain. Intel gave up on phones because they never made it anywhere in that market anyway. I would still love to see a refreshed non-pro Surface with Goldmont, though.
  • Communism - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Still waiting for intel to announce a core-m phone :P

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