Whenever Intel’s maligned Atom lineup is mentioned, it always brings to mind the poor old netbooks. With a purposefully slow architecture, the Atoms were often underpowered for the tasks demanded of them. Since then, Intel has put in the work to make Atom great again and with the new C3000 lineup, the company aims to bring 16 core enterprise processors.
Scrapping the old Atom architecture and starting new, Intel came up with their new Silvermont designs which were powerful enough to run desktops and be used for servers and other enterprise workloads. The C2000 series featured up to 8 cores on a single chip. With the new C3000 series, Intel is using the new and improved Goldmont architecture and putting 16 cores together. The new processors will be used for servers, NAS, IoT and embedded devices.
As expected of an enterprise lineup, the C3000’s feature many previously Xeon focused features like hardware virtualization and RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) technologies. Unlike the flawed C2000 series which caused a myriad of hardware and system failures recently exposed, the C3000’s should be more reliable. Hopefully, the manufacturing side of things will be more robust this time around and less prone to causing system failure.
