A leaked slide showing Intel Grand Ridge’s overview has been leaked during AdoredTV’s OverVolted Podcast. The slide showed that Intel Grand Ridge will have up to 24 Atom cores, will support DDR5 and PCIe 4.0. With the Grand Ridge platform, Intel is planning to introduce an MCM based processor with up to 24 cores glued together by Scalable Coherent Fabric.
Intel’s Grand Ridge is an Atom-based architecture and its main design purpose is for 5G base stations. It will take over from Snow Ridge, which was released in late 2019. It brings many new features to the table, which includes dual-channel DDR5 memory support up to 5600 MHz. The new platform will also support PCI-Express 4.0 standard and Gracemont CPU cores. The PCIe will feature 16 lanes per SoC in Gen 4.0 with Bifurcation support x16, x8, x4, x2, and x1.
The Gracemont architecture will be the first update since the dated Tremont architecture and will represent a massive leap in IPC and overall compute, thanks to its MCM design and low power segments. Intel’s aim is to expand on the Atom side, and it starts with Grand Ridge, which will be featuring the new Gracemont architecture.
Another big improvement is in the clock speed. Intel Grand Ridge will have speeds up to 2.6Ghz on a 24 core Atom chip. This is a massive jump from the previous Snow Ridge generation. The Grand Ridge series will be 400 MHz faster than Snow Ridge.
According to the leaked slide, the architecture is expected to release in 2021. The slide also shows that the Atom processors are to be based on 7nm HLL+ process technology. But Intel recently announced delays to its 7nm process due to development problems, with the earliest release now projected in 2022. So, it is most probable that the chips will now be based on the 10nm architecture.
