FH8601

Overview

A new emerging segment exists in the server marketplace that Intel Corporation calls Microserver. The Intel® Atom™ Processor C2000 Product Family for Microserver is the next generation of System-On-Chip (SoC) 64-bit processor built on the 22-nanometer process technology designed for certain lightweight scale out workloads. This highly integrated SoC contains two, four, or eight processor cores depending on the product SKU. Throughout this document, the Intel® Atom™ Processor C2000 Product Family for Microserver is also referred to as simply SoC. This document relates to the product SKUs shown in Table 1-1.

Key Features

The main SoC architectural features are:
• SKUs containing two, four, or eight cores (Table 1-1)
— Intel® Xeon® processor Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) compatibility
— Out-of-order instruction execution
— Intel® Virtualization Technology, VT-x2
— 1 MB shared L2 Cache (per two cores), 4 MB L2 total for the eight-core SKUs
— SKU base frequencies of 1.7 GHz and 2.4 GHz
— Intel® Turbo Boost Technology for speeds up to 2.7 GHz depending on SKU
• Dual-Channel DDR3 Memory
— Single- or Dual-Channel Memory Controller, SKU dependent
— DDR3L (1.35V), DDR3 (1.5V), SKU dependency
— Speeds up to 1600 MT/s depending on SKU
— ECC support
— Support for single- or dual-rank DIMMs
— Support up to two DIMMs per channel
— Up to 64 GB DDR3 memory capacity support, depending on product SKU.
• Integrated
— PCI Express Gen 2 Root Ports, up to 16 lanes, bifurcates to 4 controllers
— Four Enterprise Class Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Ports Per SoC (1 Gb or 2.5 Gb)
• Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI) allows for connectivity to a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) for the purpose of enabling out-of-band remote manageability.
• SMBus ports are available and continue to be available to enable network manageability implementations.
• SoC designs can use either SMBus or NC-SI for connectivity to the BMC, but not both.
• The SoC GbE Interface provides support for IEEE 802.3 1000BASE-KX and 2500BASE-X.
— Four SATA2 Ports to support high-capacity rotational media, one SKU with no SATA2
— Two SATA3 Ports to support solid-state drives (SSDs) requiring high rates of I/O operations per second (IOPS)
— USB 2.0 x4, EHCI compliant
— SMBus x4 (Host, PECI, normal SPD, and LAN interface)
• Based on new Intel SoC design technology
— Next-Generation SoC System Agent (SSA)
— Significant improvements in performance and latency than current Intel® Atom™ processor system agents.
— Common legacy block controllers (SPI, UART, RTC, HPET, etc.)
• Power Management
— Significant improvements to support lightweight server power management
— Exposed PECI over SMBus mechanism
— Highly-optimized Power Management Unit (PMU)
— Support for Turbo, Running Average Power Limiting (RAPL)
— SVID support to optimize power consumption
• Server-Class Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS)
— Data and address for memory ECC
— Demand and Patrol Scrub to detect and correct memory errors
— Significant internal data-path parity protection

Functional descriptions of these SoC features and other integrated devices are in the remaining chapters.