TSMC to produce next-generation Atom & Xeon SoCs for Intel

Tom's Hardware
Date: December 03, 2020
By: Anton Shilov 

A job description on Intel's website gives us a rare glimpse at Intel's outsourcing plans. It's no secret that Intel will outsource more production to TSMC in the future, but so far, the company has been pretty vague about the details. According to the job listing, in addition to Xe-HPG GPUs and Xe-HPC compute slices, TSMC will also produce 'Atom and Xeon' system-on-chips for Intel.   

"As a member of the QAT design team, you will work as the RTL integration lead within the Custom Logic ASIC Engineering group in DCG [Data Center Group]," the job description at Intel's website (found by @Komachi_Ensaka) reads. "You will play a key role in the development and integration of QAT into Atom & Xeon based SoC on Intel and TSMC process, you will work with the IP/SoC integration team and collaborate with the SoC design, validation and emulation teams to ensure successful integration validation of the QAT IP." 

Intel’s QuickAssist Technology (QAT) is a hardware IP designed to accelerate cryptographic and compression workloads. Over the years, Intel has incorporated QAT IP into chipsets and SoCs. The company has also offered QAT add-in-cards. Given that security and compression technologies are tremendously important for all kinds of edge, networking, storage, and server applications, Intel integrates this hardware IP into all of its processors and SoCs for the said devices. 

To address various niche markets, Intel currently produces numerous specialized Atom and Xeon-branded SoCs. This year the company introduced Atom 'Snow Ridge' SoCs with up to 24 Tremont cores for 5G base stations, as well as Atom 'Elkhart Lake' SoCs with up to four Tremont cores for various edge and embedded computing applications. Also, Intel has Xeon D-series SoCs powered by Skylake-SP cores in its lineup that are aimed at networking and storage applications. So far, Intel has not announced a single Xeon-branded SoC with low-power Atom cores.     [FULL  STORY]