Earlier in the week Gigabyte launched a new server motherboard that came packing a previously unannounced Intel Atom C3958 16-core 2.0GHz processor. Hexus points out that this product launch was a little ahead of Intel’s own announcement of the chip range, which was done today.

The processors are designed for light scale-out workloads that require very low power, high density, and high I/O integration including network routers, switches, storage, security appliances, dynamic web serving, and more.

Chipzilla says that the Intel's Atom C3000 series SoCs are designed to deliver "low power, efficient intelligence, to the farthest edge of the network," They will start to appear in Network and Enterprise Storage products.

Intel claims they can deliver up to 4.0x storage performance improvement, up to 3.4x network performance improvement, and up to 2.3x compute performance improvement

The C3000 series are the third-generation system-on-a-chip based CPUs manufactured on Intel's optimized 14nm process technology.

At the top end Intel offers the Atom C3958 with 16-cores and running at 2.0GHz at $449. This 31W processor can use up to 256GB of RAM and can support 8x USB 3.0 ports, 16 SATA ports, and offers 4x10/2.5/1GbE LAN. Here is the list: