Intel's 15W Pentium 350 CPU Now Available, Targets Micro-Servers

While most of us won't associate Pentium processors with servers, Intel seems to have another opinion in this regard as it recently made available the Pentium 350 CPU that has a TDP of just 15W and targets micro-server systems.

In March of this year, Intel announced that it plans to ship a series of low- and ultra-low power processors for this type of servers and the Pentium 350 is the first one of these chips to arrive.

As a result of its newly found role, the Pentium 350 resembles much more the Xeon E3-1220L rather than the ULV version of consumer Pentium or Core i3 processors, according to CPU-World.

What this means is that similarly to the 1220L, the new chip includes two computing cores, 3MB of Level 3 cache memory, and support for ECC memory, while lacking an integrated graphics unit.

In addition, the chip also comes with Hyper-Threading enabled in order to process up to four threads simultaneously, a characteristic that no other Pentium CPU based on the Sandy Bridge architecture possesses.

This is however where the similarities between the E3-1220L and the Pentium 350 end as the latter doesn't come with support for the AES-NI and AVX instruction sets, Turbo Boost and Trusted Execution also missing from the specs list.

Furthermore, the Pentium 350 is clocked significantly lower than E3-1220L as its cores run at 1.2GHz compared with the 2.2GHz of its Xeon counterpart.

Despite these limitations, the small 15W Thermal Design Power (TDP), and socket 1155 compatibility should make the 350 a great alternative for HTPC systems or home server use.

Sadly, Intel has no plans of selling this CPU to end-users and will only ship it in micro-servers and other similar products. The pricing of the processor is not known.

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