by James E. Carroll
At CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Intel announced a new SoC family codenamed "Snow Ridge" that is targeted at 5G base stations. Compared to existing base station silicon, which conventionally has been fixed function and proprietary, Intel said it will deliver a solution that leverages all of the technology it has developed for the server market. Snow Ridge will be delivered in 10nm.
At a CES keynote, Intel demonstrated how a Snow Ridge-powered base station could prioritize traffic based on the application. The company also reiterated that its first 5G modem on track for the second half of the year.
Also announced at the event was Intel Project Athena, which is new set of industry specifications for building a new class of advanced laptops designed for 5G connectivity and artificial intelligence. Intel says instant-on connectivity will enable new user experiences.
Project Athena Project specifics:
- An annual spec outlining platform requirements
- New user experience and benchmarking targets defined by real-world usage models
- Extensive co-engineering support and innovation pathfinding
- Ecosystem collaboration to accelerate key laptop component development and availability
- Verification of Project Athena devices through a comprehensive certification process
Intel’s Project Athena partners include Acer, Asus, Dell, Google, HP, Innolux, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung and Sharp, among others.
Intel also showed a "Lakefield" sample motherboard based on 10nm hybrid CPU architecture and is 3D "Foveros" packaging technology. Lakefield has five cores, combining a 10nm high-performance Sunny Cove core with four Intel Atom processor-based cores into a tiny package that delivers low-power efficiency with graphics and other IPs, I/O and memory.
Intel also said it is on track to release its Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP-I) later this year, promising industry-leading inference performance. Inference applications will include image recognition and image classification. Facebook is a development partner.
