Silvermont is a

microarchitecture In computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as µarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular processor. A given ISA may be imp ...

for low-power

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, a ...

Celeron Celeron is Intel's brand name for low-end IA-32 and x86-64 computer microprocessor models targeted at low-cost personal computers. Celeron processors are compatible with IA-32 software. They typically offer less performance per clock speed co ...

and

Pentium Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and P ...

branded processors used in systems on a chip (SoCs) made by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

. Silvermont forms the basis for a total of four SoC families: * ''Merrifield'' and ''Moorefield'' consumer SoCs intended for

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whi ...

s * ''Bay Trail'' consumer SoCs aimed at tablets, hybrid devices,

netbook Netbook was a commonly used term that identified a product class of small and inexpensive laptops which were sold from 2007 to around 2013. These machines were designed primarily as cost-effective tools for consumers to access the Inte ...

nettop A nettop (or miniature PC, Mini PC or Smart Micro PC) is a small-sized, inexpensive, low-power, legacy-free desktop computer designed for basic tasks such as web browsing, accessing web-based applications, document processing, and audio/vid ...

s, and embedded/automotive systems * ''Avoton'' SoCs for micro-servers and storage devices * ''Rangeley'' SoCs targeting network and communication infrastructure. Silvermont is the successor of the Bonnell, using a newer

22 nm process The 22 nm node is the process step following 32 nm in CMOS MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The typical half-pitch (i.e., half the distance between identical features in an array) for a memory cell using the process is around 22 nm ...

(previously introduced with Ivy Bridge) and a new

, replacing Hyper Threading with

out-of-order execution In computer engineering, out-of-order execution (or more formally dynamic execution) is a paradigm used in most high-performance central processing units to make use of instruction cycles that would otherwise be wasted. In this paradigm, a proces ...

. Silvermont was announced to news media on May 6, 2013, at Intel's headquarters at Santa Clara, California. Intel had repeatedly said the first Bay Trail devices would be available during the Holiday 2013 timeframe, while leaked slides showed that the release window for Bay Trail-T as August 28 – September 13, 2013. Both Avoton and Rangeley were announced as being available in the second half of 2013. The first Merrifield devices were announced in 1H14. According to the

Tick–tock model Tick–tock was a production model adopted in 2007 by chip manufacturer Intel. Under this model, every microarchitecture change (tock) was followed by a die shrink of the process technology (tick). It was replaced by the process–architecture� ...

Airmont is the 14 nm

die shrink The term die shrink (sometimes optical shrink or process shrink) refers to the scaling of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices. The act of shrinking a die is to create a somewhat identical circuit using a more advanced fabrication process, u ...

of Silvermont, launched in early 2015 and first seen in the Atom x7-Z8700 as used in the

Microsoft Surface 3 Surface 3 is a 2-in-1 detachable from the Microsoft Surface series, introduced by Microsoft in 2015. Unlike its predecessor, the Surface 2, Surface 3 utilizes an x86 Intel Atom system-on-chip architecture, or SoC, rather than a processor wit ...

. Airmont microarchitecture includes the following SoC families: * ''Braswell'' consumer SoCs aimed at PCs * ''Cherry Trail'' consumer SoCs aimed at tablets. Silvermont based cores have also been used, modified, in the Knight's Landing iteration of Intel's

Xeon Phi Xeon Phi was a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application program ...

HPC chips.

Design

Silvermont was the first

processor to feature an out-of-order architecture.

Technology

* A 22 nm manufacturing process based on 3D

tri-gate transistor The 22 nm node is the process step following 32 nm in CMOS MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The typical half-pitch (i.e., half the distance between identical features in an array) for a memory cell using the process is around 22 nm ...

s *

System on chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

architecture * Consumer chips up to quad-core, business-class chips up to eight cores * Supports

SSE4.2 SSE4 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 4) is a SIMD CPU instruction set used in the Intel Core (microarchitecture), Core microarchitecture and AMD K10, AMD K10 (K8L). It was announced on September 27, 2006, at the Fall 2006 Intel Developer Forum, with vag ...

instruction set * Gen 7

Intel HD Graphics Intel Graphics Technology (GT) is the collective name for a series of integrated graphics processors (IGPs) produced by Intel that are manufactured on the same package or die as the central processing unit (CPU). It was first introduced in 20 ...

with

DirectX 11 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

, OpenGL 4.0, and OpenCL 1.1 support. OpenGL 4.0 is supported with 10.18.10.5161 WHQL and later drivers. On Android, Silvermont graphics is

OpenGL ES 3.1 OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-acce ...

certified. * 10 W TDP desktop processors * 4.5 and 7.5 W TDP mobile processors * 20 W TDP Server and Communications processors

Errata

Intel revealed in its Q4 2016 quarterly report that there were quality issues in the C2000 product family, which had an effect on the financial performance of the company's Data Center Group that quarter. An

erratum An erratum or corrigendum (plurals: errata, corrigenda) (comes from la, errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing pro ...

named AVR54 published by Intel; state there is a defect in the chip's LPC clock, and affected systems "may experience inability to boot or may cease operation". A workaround is available requiring platform hardware changes. The SoC failures are thought to have led to failures in

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

and

Synology Synology Inc. () is a Taiwanese corporation that specializes in network-attached storage (NAS) appliances. Synology's line of NAS is known as the DiskStation for desktop models, FlashStation for all-flash models, and RackStation for rack-mou ...

products, though discussion of the C2000 as the root cause of failure has been reported to be under a

non-disclosure agreement A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a legal contract or part of a contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wis ...

for many vendors. Intel released a new C0 stepping of the C2000 series in April 2017 which corrected the bug. In July 2017 Intel published that a similar quality issue affects also Atom E3800 series embedded processors. The erratum named VLI89 published by Intel state, similar to issue with Atom C2000, that there is a defect in the chip's LPC clock and affected systems "may experience inability to boot or may cease operation". Issues extend also to USB bus and SD card circuitry and should happen "under certain conditions where activity is high for several years". In April 2018 Intel announced it is releasing a new D1 stepping to fix the issue. The LPC, USB and SD Card buses circuitry degradation issues also apply to other Bay Trail processors such as Intel Celeron J1900 and N2800/N2900 series; also to Pentium N3500, J2850, J2900 series; and Celeron J1800 and J1750 series—as those are based on the same affected silicon. Cisco stated failures of Atom C2000 processors can occur as early as 18 months of use with higher failure rates occurring after 36 months. Mitigations were found to limit impact on systems. Firmware update for the LPC bus called LPC_CLKRUN# reduces the utilization of the LPC interface what in turn decreases (but not eliminates) LPC bus degradation - some systems are however not compatible with this new firmware. USB should have a maximum of 10% active time and there is a 50TB transmit traffic life expectancy over the lifetime of the port. It is recommended not to use SD card as a boot device and to remove the card from the system when not in use.

Bay Trail issues on Linux

It has been widely reported that Bay Trail cpus (and possibly their derivatives including Airmont/Braswell/Cherry Trail) experience random freezes / lock-ups on various Linux kernels. Reference linu
bug report 109051
on

Kernel.org kernel.org is the main distribution point of source code for the Linux kernel, which is the base of the Linux operating system. Website The website and related infrastructure, which are operated by the Linux Kernel Organization, host the reposi ...

Bugzilla Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug tracking system and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Released as open-source software by Netscape Communications in 199 ...

, first reported Dec-2015. Workaround seems to be setting the linux kernel flag intel_idle.max_cstate=1, which while eliminating the system freezes/lock-ups, results in increased cpu power/battery usage by preventing the cpu from entering higher power-saving C-states. Systems running Windows-OSes apparently do not experience these lockup/freeze issues.

Bay Trail issues on FreeBSD

A potential fix is to set and via .

Airmont issues

14 nm Airmont architecture processors are also affected by the design flaws as noted in the Braswell Specification Update under CHP49 errata. In addition to LPC and SD Card circuitry degradation issues those 14 nm designs also have issues with Real Time Clock (RTC) circuitry degradation, their USB buses are however not affected. Unspecified firmware changes are required to mitigate RTC circuitry degradation. Intel does not plan to release a new stepping for Braswell. Intel admitted the issue stating the impact on consumers depends on use condition.

List of Silvermont processors

Desktop processors (Bay Trail-D)

List of desktop processors as follows:

Server processors (Avoton)

It has been found that a bug in the blueprint of the C2000 CPUs family may cause failure of its embedded Ethernet ports. List of server processors as follows:

Communications processors (Rangeley)

List of upcoming communications processors as follows:

Embedded/automotive processors (Bay Trail-I)

List of embedded processors as follows:

Mobile processors (Bay Trail-M)

List of mobile processors as follows:

Tablet processors (Bay Trail-T)

List of tablet and hybrid processors as follows:

Smartphone processors (Merrifield)

List of smartphone processors as follows:

Smartphone processors (Moorefield)

List of smartphone processors as follows:

List of Airmont processors

Desktop processors (Braswell)

List of desktop processors as follows:

Mobile processors (Braswell)

List of mobile processors as follows:

Tablet processors (Cherry Trail)

List of smartphone and tablet processors as follows:

Other uses

Silvermont based processor cores have been used in

Knights Landing Knights Landing (formerly, Baltimore and East Grafton) is a census-designated place in Yolo County, California, United States, founded by William Knight. It is located on the Sacramento River around 25 miles northwest of Sacramento in the northeas ...

versions of Intel's

multiprocessor HPC chips, with changes for HPC including

AVX-512 AVX-512 are 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions SIMD instructions for x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) proposed by Intel in July 2013, and implemented in Intel's Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing) and Skylake-X CPUs; t ...

vector units.

Roadmap

References

{{Intel processors, silvermont Intel x86 microprocessors Intel microarchitectures X86 microarchitectures