Intel announces latest members of their 5G infrastructure portfolio

Intel may have exited the consumer-oriented leg of the 5G race by selling off its mobile modem business to Apple, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything in the 5G scene. They have just announced a new lineup of products to tap into the growing industry surrounding 5G networks.

Intel Atom P5900 SoC

The Intel Atom P5900 is designed to deliver improved performance at 5G base stations. Intel makes pretty big claims about the chipset, including a 80% increase in integer throughput compared to the Atom C3000. It also features hardware-based packet balancing and cryptography for 3.7x and 5.6x packet balancing and packet security throughput compared to software-based solutions.

Intel will be making the Atom P5900 on their 10nm process node, and will also make use of the Sunny Cove core architecture. This move might be propelled by the need of higher efficiency in this SoC.

*New* 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors

Intel also announced the new 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors to cater to the cloud, network and edge needs of their customers. The recent announcement was their newer SKUs which deliver 36% more performance and 42% better value than the previous generation. Intel was also quick to boast of the 6x higher AI performance than “competitive CPU platforms. In addition to that, there are the new Intel Xeon Scalable N-SKUs which are network-optimized to deliver up to 58% better virtualized network performance.

Intel “Diamond Mesa” structured ASIC

In addition to SoCs like the Atom P5900, Intel also has FPGA, structured ASIC and custom ASIC. Today Intel announced that they will be making the Intel “Diamond Mesa” structured ASIC available for “early access”, whatever that means. Intel promises various up to 2x higher performance and 50% lower power consumption as compared to earlier generations, in addition to being footprint compatible with Intel FPGAs.

Intel Ethernet 700 Series Network Adapter

The Intel Ethernet 700 Series is the first 5G network-optimized ethernet NIC with hardware-enhanced Precision Time Protocol, targeting 100ns base accuracy for time-sensitive applications. Intel calls this their “cost-effective” offering and is currently sampling with mass production expected to start by the 2nd quarter of 2020.

Pokdepinion: Oh Atom, how have you grown…