Tuesday, April 24th 2018
Intel's Next Atom Core, Tremont, Revealed - Likely to Be Fabbed on the 10 nm Process
Intel, via its internal documentation that is, routinely, the source of new information on unreleased products, has revealed their next low-power architecture. Codenamed Tremont, the new architecture is expected to be developed on the company's 10 nm process (not unlike Ice Lake) and bring some performance improvements to the company's options for the embedded market.
Tremont will thus replace Intel's Goldmont Plus, which is still being manufactured on the company's 14 nm process (it hasn't been side-graded to the company's 14 nm + or ++ processes, due to these being less suited for denser chip designs). The new architecture will likely receive some specific performance improvements that mirror some of Intel's Core architecture's improvements, alongside support for new instruction sets - CLWB, GFNI (SSE-based), ENCLV, Split Lock Detection instruction set extensions are all extensions that will also be introduced in the company's Ice Lake cores, which increases the likelihood of the same process. Other functions introduced specifically for Tremont include CLDEMOTE, direct store, and user wait instructions.
Sources:
Intel, AnandTech
Tremont will thus replace Intel's Goldmont Plus, which is still being manufactured on the company's 14 nm process (it hasn't been side-graded to the company's 14 nm + or ++ processes, due to these being less suited for denser chip designs). The new architecture will likely receive some specific performance improvements that mirror some of Intel's Core architecture's improvements, alongside support for new instruction sets - CLWB, GFNI (SSE-based), ENCLV, Split Lock Detection instruction set extensions are all extensions that will also be introduced in the company's Ice Lake cores, which increases the likelihood of the same process. Other functions introduced specifically for Tremont include CLDEMOTE, direct store, and user wait instructions.
4 Comments on Intel's Next Atom Core, Tremont, Revealed - Likely to Be Fabbed on the 10 nm Process
The Intel Atom C2000 series errata AVR54 would result in a bricked system. This affected or potentially affected a whole host of devices from many different manufacturers. Apparently there was a fix for it depending on the motherboard design. One fix was the addition of a pulldown resister, although, some motherboard manufacturers "might" allow for a simple BIOS adjustment.
I have Synology NAS that uses the Intel Atom C2538 SoC and there are a number of threads in the Synology forums on this issue. The panic is palpable especially for those with NAS models outside of warranty and no longer supported. Synology extended the warranty of some models an additional year but didn't do a recall while some other manufacturers like CISCO did do recalls. After hearing about fixed models (early 2017 models) I called Synology support and requested a fixed model. They sent me a brand new unit which was manufactured with the fix at the factory (not an older modified one) and it cost me nothing.