Intel Announces 10nm Atom x6000E Elkhart Lake, Celeron and Pentium CPUs

Intel announced its new Atom x6000E series 'Elkhart Lake' of processors today, along with Pentium and Celeron N and J series chips, all targeted at industrial, embedded, and IoT applications. Intel is also pressing its Tiger Lake-UP3 chips into service for edge applications that require a higher level of performance. 

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The 10nm+ Atom x6000E, Pentium, and Celeron processors feature either dual- or quad-core Tremont designs. Base frequencies for the Atom models vary between 1.2 to 1.8 GHz, while boost speeds top at at 3.0 GHz for chips that come with the feature. The Atom chips serve the 4.5W to 12W TDP range, while Intel splits the Pentium and Celeron processors into 6.5W and 10W variants. [EDIT: Intel reached out to clarify that the Atom, Pentium and Celeron processors do not use the 10nm SuperFin process, instead using 10nm+]

All models have baked in support for up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 or LPDDR4x-4267 memory, much like the Tiger Lake processors, and come in BGA-mounted packages, meaning they aren't socketed processors. Intel also segments the stack by only providing ECC support for the Atom processors. 

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The lineup comes with Gen11 graphics, which Intel says offers up to twice the performance of the Gen9 graphics found on prior-gen models. Atom also takes a step forward, courtesy of the Tremont architecture, to notch a 1.7X gain in single-threaded workloads and 1.5X gain in multi-threaded work over previous-gen Goldmont Plus. 

As we see with chips destined for the IoT space, Intel offers a seven to ten-year support window, and that includes ensuring the chips will be available throughout that same window. Intel also leans in on AI support with this generation, including support for the OpenVINO toolkit that includes containerized packages to speed deployment of automation, sensing, and vision applications. 

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Tiger Lake-UP3

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Intel is also pressing its Tiger Lake-UP3 chips into service for applications that require a higher level of performance. These chips come with all of the normal trimmings of the Tiger Lake processors, which you can read about in-depth here, like the 10nm SuperFin process, Xe LP graphics, Thunderbolt 4, and support for AVX-512 and VNNI.