Chip maker Intel Corp. today released a portfolio of data centre products and technologies aimed at cloud service providers.
The portfolio includes the company’s second generation 64-bit Intel Atom C2000 family of system-on-chip (SoC) processors for microservers and cold storage platforms, codenamed Avoton. Another SoC chip codenamed Rangeley, aimed at entry network platforms was also released.
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) also introduced the Ethernet Switch FM5224. When combined with the WindRiver Open Network Software suite, the FM5224 provides software defined networking (SDN) capability for servers.
The company also demonstrated the first operational Intel Rack Scale Architecture (RSA)-based rack with Intel’s silicon photonics technology and a new MXC connector and the ClearCurve optical fibre developed by Corning.
The releases are meant to capitalize on the emergence of microservers, cold storage and entry networking segments brought about by increasingly diverse set of lightweight workloads.
For instance, according to Intel, The new SoC products are the company’s first products based on the Silvermont micro-architecture. The SoC’s new 22mm Tri-Gate SoC process delivers significant increases in performance and energy efficiency. It is being released just nine months after the previous version.
“As the world becomes more and more mobile, the pressure to support billions of devices and users is changing the very composition of data centres,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice-president of data centre and connected systems group at Intel.
The 13 new SoC models have customized features and accelerators optimized for lightweight workloads such as entry dedicated hosting, distributed memory caching, static Web serving and content delivery.
For example, the new Atom configurations for entry networking addresses the needs for securing and routing Internet traffic more efficiently. The product has a set of hardware accelerators called Quick Assist Technology that improves cryptographic performance making it ideal for deployment in routers and security appliances.
