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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  • ChefJeff789 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    With an AMOLED screen and a dock for use at home... I'd buy it immediately.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Only if it has full W10 x86... (it will never happen)
  • Communism - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    It's like Microsoft and Intel hate money or something.
  • Meteor2 - Sunday, July 17, 2016 - link

    Seriously though, I don't think Core M can go down to 2W.
  • serendip - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link

    Nope and that's why I'm sad that Intel abandoned that segment. I've been looking for a new Windows 10 tablet to replace my old Dell Venue 8 Pro but I can't find anything good. Intel simply doesn't have new tablet SOCs in the <2W arena. Maybe I'll get a Surface 3 (non-Pro) on clearance and use that for a few years.
  • bernstein - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Nice board, but since Xeon-D Boards are possible for less than $500 i'd rather see the same board with a Xeon-D SoC. Especially the dual SFP+ & 16x SATA makes it ideal for integrated routing/nas appliances.
  • bernstein - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    the integrated emmc is a nice thing too, haven't seen this on an apeed enabled mitx server board
  • basroil - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I'de like one of these to be my new NAS+server+render farm controller... Should pack enough juice to do all at the same time if there's 8 CT cores
  • BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    If Intel's new Denverton chips can hit the same TDP or lower with that 30% performance uplift per core than Intel's previous Avoton chips, then we may see a new performance-per-watt king in the low power server arena.
  • vladx - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    No USB 3.0/3.1?

    Fail

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