Intel Atom C5000 Series Updated with Pricing Inflation Takes Hold

Intel recently updated some of its information on the Intel Atom C5000 series. When the series was initially launched, we did not have the MSRP/ RCP for the SoCs. At the time, the big question was down to price. Now we have that information and it appears as though these small chips are not immune to inflation, with a caveat. Let us get to it.

Intel Atom C5000 Series Updated with Pricing Inflation Takes Hold

When we originally looked at the new Atom C5000 SKUs, we had a fairly good grasp of the storage-focused C5100 series and the networking-focused C5300 series. Intel will be pushing its QuickAssist Technology in the coming quarters, and we already have in the pipeline two pieces showing some of the dramatic offload benefits as an update to our Intel QuickAssist at 40GbE Speeds: IPsec VPN Testing and OpenSSL and Setup Tips pieces from 5-6 years ago. The Atom line has changed to embrace acceleration, and that is reflected in the new parts. Still, we did not have pricing.

With the latest update, we were able to add pricing into the equation and it seems as though Intel is using $213 as the base recommended price for 4-core models and $299-320 for the 8-core parts. That puts the per-core pricing in the $37.38 to $53.25 range.

To us, it seemed a bit higher than we remembered, so we added these to the 4 and 8-core Atom C3000 series SKUs we had numbers for.

What we saw is that the RCP for the new chips has gone up. Just taking an average of the SKUs above, 4 cores in the Atom C3000 line were $20.35 and in the Atom C5000 series, they are fixed at $53.25. On the eight-core parts, it was less dramatic with the C3000 average of $24.44 and the C5000 average of $38.25. roughly doubled for the quad-core parts and the eight-core parts.

Again, a big part of the increase is not just the cores themselves, but the other features of the SOCs.

We discussed the acceleration in the Intel Atom C5000 and P5000 Acceleration Including Networking and QAT piece, but those accelerators mean fewer PCIe-based components, smaller packages, but also higher TDPs. Not adding a 25W PCIe accelerator and an extra NIC means that the net costs can go down, especially with the C5300 series, but the SoC prices go up.

Final Words

At this juncture, prices have increased on just about everything, so the Atom C5000 series is no different. Still, these increased prices will mean more expensive end devices in some classes since the floor to get into a 4-core Atom has gone from $64 to $213. It seems like Intel will need to have something like the Jasper Lake series STH has been doing reviews of recently to provide a lower-cost and lower-acceleration solution in the market that cannot handle $200+ pricing on Atom C series SoCs.