Chipmaker giant Intel recently announced that the company's first ever Xeon system-on-chip (SoC). The Xeon D 1500 processor family is built on the foundation laid by the Xeon E3 and the Atom SoC.
Intel said that the new processor will power the next generation of servers and cloud computers with emphasis on "network edge." The Xeon D 1500 targets the lower-end server market where they plan to implement efficiency and networking.
The Xeon D 1500 is based on the 14nm Broadwell core architecture developed by Intel. The new chip integrates the Broadwell architecture in to an SoC form and test runs on the processor shows that it can deliver more three times better performance per what compared to previous versions of the Xeon chipset.
Intel general manager for the data centre product group Lisa Spelman presented the new chipset to the media and said that it will come in two variants; the 2.2GHz Xeon D 1520 quad-core and the 2GHz Xeon D1540 octa-core, both variants running at 45W, according to ArsTechnica.
Spelman said, "It's our first Xeon SoC, brought down into an SoC form factor, with better performance per watt, offering a foundation for growth and better networking spanning down to devices."
Intel added that the new Xeon SoC will have an integrated I/O and networking in order to be fully connected into microservers for networking and storage purposes, according to The Inquirer.
Some of the integrated features of the Xeon SoC are Intel Platform Storage Extension (PSE), Non-Transparent Bridging (NTB), Asynchronous DRAM self-refresh (ADR), and Intel Quick Data Technology.