Intel today took the wraps off its brand new, low-power, high-performance microarchitecture named Silvermont. The technology is aimed squarely at low-power requirements in market segments from smartphones to the data center. Silvermont will be the foundation for a range of innovative products beginning to come to market later this year, and will also be manufactured using Intel’s leading-edge, 22nm Tri-Gate SoC manufacturing process, which brings significant performance increases and improved energy efficiency.
The Silvermont microarchitecture delivers industry-leading performance-per-watt efficiency. The highly balanced design brings increased support for a wider dynamic range and seamlessly scales up and down in performance and power efficiency. On a variety of standard metrics, Silvermont also enables ~3x peak performance or the same performance at ~5x lower power over the current-generation Intel Atom processor core.
Intel’s Silvermont microarchitecture was designed and co-optimized with Intel’s 22nm SoC process using revolutionary 3-D Tri-gate transistors. By taking advantage of this industry-leading technology, Intel is able to provide a significant performance increase and improved energy efficiency.
Additional highlights of the Silvermont microarchitecture include:
A new out-of-order execution engine enables best-in-class, single-threaded performance.1
A new multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.
New IA 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 and the breadth of the IA software installed base.
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. The performance-per-watt improvements with the new microarchitecture will enable a significant difference in performance and responsiveness for the compute devices built around these products.
