Intel Launches Silvermont Microarchitecture

Intel Corporation has unveiled Silvermont, the company's low-power, high-performance microarchitecture.

The technology is aimed at low-power requirements in market segments from smartphones to the data center. Intel says that Silvermont will be the foundation for a range of products beginning to come to market later this year, and will also be made using the company's 22nm Tri-Gate SoC manufacturing process, which brings "significant" performance increases and improved energy efficiency.

The Silvermont microarchitecture delivers high performance-per-watt efficiency, Intel says. The design brings increased support for a wider dynamic range and it scales up and down in performance and power efficiency. On a variety of standard metrics, Silvermont also enables triple the peak performance or the same performance at five times lower power over the current-generation of Intel's Atom processor core.

Additional highlights of the Silvermont microarchitecture include:

• A multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling what Intel calls greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.
• New architecture instructions and technologies bringing enhanced performance, virtualization and security management capabilities to support a wide range of products. These instructions build on Intel's existing support for 64-bit.
• Enhanced power management capabilities including a new intelligent burst technology, low-power C states and a wider dynamic range of operation taking advantage of Intel's 3-D transistors. Intel Burst Technology 2.0 support for single- and multi-core offers great responsiveness scaled for power efficiency.

Silvermont will serve as the foundation for a breadth of 22nm products expected in market later this year:

Intel's quad-core "Bay Trail" SoC is scheduled for holiday 2013 tablets and will more than double the compute performance capability of Intel's current-generation tablet offering.

Intel's "Merrifield" is scheduled to ship to customers by the end of this year. It will enable increased performance and battery life over current-generation products and brings support for context aware and personal services, ultra-fast connections for Web streaming, and increased data, device and privacy protection.

Intel's "Avoton" will enable industry-leading energy efficiency and performance-per-watt for microservers2, storage and scale out workloads in the data center.