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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  • Cygni - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I don't think you understand what this board is for...
  • vladx - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    I know but USB 3.0 should still be there for those several use cases.
  • The_Assimilator - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    16 SATA devices and 2 10GbE ports in the mITX form factor? Yes please!
  • doggface - Sunday, July 17, 2016 - link

    Oooooooo. Mmm. Tasty indeed.
  • utferris - Sunday, October 16, 2016 - link

    Really want this Soc. Just wondering when can I buy it.

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