Intel Atom P5000 Series Mightily Expanded and with a NetSec Card

Today, Intel expanded the Snow Ridge line of Atom processors. The Intel Atom P5900 series was originally launched in 2020 with four SKUs. Today’s launch adds nine new SKUs to the 100GbE capable 10nm Atom line. Intel also announced a card version of the Snow Ridge platform with up to 16 x86 e-cores and 25GbE/ 100GbE networking options called the NetSec (network security) card.

Intel Atom P5000 Series Mightily Expanded

The original Intel Atom P5900 series launch had four SKUs that were intended for 5G base stations:

This is a really interesting series of processors that has been hard to find out there unless you were building base stations. Not only do we get a number of 10nm Atom cores, but we also get QAT up to 100Gbps (uni-directional)/ 50Gbps (bi-directional) and 50/100GbE networking built-in. There is also onboard switching connectivity on these parts.

Just for some time sense here, as of Q1 2019 the Intel Atom P5900 series was supposed to launch in 2H 2019. Per Ark it was launched in Q1 2020 since it was caught in the 10nm process roll-out.

Now, we have nine new SKUs to fill out the range. Previously the range was called the Atom P5900 series and had a B at the end (for base station?) but the new chips are Atom P5300 and P5700 series parts. We are just going to call everything in the Snow Ridge umbrella “Atom P5000”.

The new SKUs have the same 2.2GHz base clock. They also have 4.5MB of cache per cluster of four cores. DDR4 speeds are generally DDR4-2933, but not always. We get the same 32 PCIe lanes and QAT.

Some differences are that the TDP of the new parts are actually listed now, they were not released for the original quartet of parts. Intel also now has half TDP SKUs, and not for sub 20W. This is 74.5W because rounding to 75W would be 0.7{ad04e458d8a67bb381461aa5bab353250a5c3a294cd93826b3ec944a191540bb} or so too high. We hope Intel discontinues this practice on these higher TDP parts and just uses round numbers, especially when there is less than a 1{ad04e458d8a67bb381461aa5bab353250a5c3a294cd93826b3ec944a191540bb} difference.

What we do not have yet is the networking, switching, and QAT acceleration performance metrics. We have requested these from Intel.

Although we do not have specific SKU level information, this is the basic feature breakdown.

Intel NetSec Card with the Atom P5000 Series

Along with the new release, Intel has a new card, it calls the NetSec Accelerator card. This card is made by Silicom and is, as you probably can see, an Intel Atom system on a card.

Here is the block diagram with dual-channel memory, high-speed 2x25GbE or 100GbE networking, a BMC an Intel i210 1GbE port for OOB management, and more.

Intel has two of these listed as potential reference designs including 8 core Intel Atom P5721 and 16-core Atom P5742 versions:

Intel is not branding these as IPUs and we are not calling them DPUs yet. Still, we can see that a lot of our readers are going to be excited by them.

Final Words

Could 2022 finally be the year that STH gets to try Snow Ridge? Only four years after it was spotted at Intel Architecture Day 2018?

Hopefully, we can get a Snow Ridge platform of some sort and show our readers. This is a very exciting platform to get to see finally hit the market.