Intel has taken the wraps off its next generation of server hardware at IDF Beijing. The company is pushing a new range of Atom, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell parts across the market. The new chips emphasize power efficiency at every level, but much of Intel’s focus is on the upcoming Atom hardware.

The chips

Intel is previewing multiple new products. The Atom Briarwood core (32nm) is already on the market — HP’s Project Moonshot is based on this processor — but Avoton and Rangely are new high-efficiency parts launching in the latter half of the year. The new Xeon E3 series will be based on Haswell, while the E7 family will upgrade to what Intel calls Ivy Bridge EX.

Here’s the same data, but with an expanded view of what Intel views as the most important features of each product segment.

The current Atom S1200 processors are dual-core chips that can address up to 8GB of RAM (competing solutions from ARM vendors like Calxeda are limited to 4GB) and support up to 8x PCIe 2.0 lanes. ARM-based products are an emerging threat to Intel’s dominance in the server market, and the company has focused significant resources on scaling up 32nm Atom products to meet the challenge in early 2013, as well as prepping Avoton hardware (based on Atom’s next-generation 22nm core) for later this year.

Performance details on the next-generation Atom core continue to be scarce; Intel claims a 50% improvement over previous-generation Atom processors. Thanks to a recently published side-by-side photo of the current S1200 and upcoming Avoton, however, we can draw some conclusions about die size.

We can use Photoshop to examine the die sizes in pixels — Intel’s published guidelines for the S1200 indicate a nominal die size of 9.86mm x 10mm. The S1200 die in the photograph is 34×35 pixels. The Avoton die is 33×30 pixels. This implies that Intel was able to substantially beef up Atom (and double the number of cores on-die) while still decreasing die size.

The new Haswell Xeons will hit TDPs as low as 13W. That’s a substantial reduction over current E3 chips, which bottom out at 17W. Finally, at the end of the year, there’s the Xeon’s E7 family, built on Ivy Bridge EX. Despite rumors that the chips could include up to 15 cores, Intel is only talking about 10-core variants today, with support for up to 4TB of memory, but the same 30MB L3 cache and 144 lanes of PCIe 2.0 as previous products in this range. That’s a huge leap from the current E7500 I/O Hub, which offers just 36 PCIe 2.0 lanes.

The goal of these endeavors is to establish Intel as the unquestioned market leader in the face of ARM’s challenge at the low end. The advances at the upper end of the market are relatively small in comparison to the full court press Chipzilla is putting out for its upcoming Atom products.

For now, Santa Clara’s advances in manufacturing technology, vendor relationships, software development, and platform features are going to keep ARM competitors limited to a relative handful of wins. The really interesting question is whether or not that’ll change late this year or early next, when Cortex-A15 parts begin to hit the market (See: ARM Cortex-A15 explained: Intel’s Atom is down, but not out.) By the time that happens, Avoton will be ready to meet them — and we’ll see if ARM can play in the wider server market.

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