Cisco gear has been bricking, and the culprit appears to be Intel’s Atom SoC.
Intel has often had a standoff relationship with its Atom line. It seems to have gained adoption despite of Intel’s lack on enthusiasm. It initially was a glorified Pentium I with a higher clock rate. It hit at just the right time to ride the netbook wave. But it always has been underpowered (intentionally) for general purpose computing, and too power hungry to really compete with ARM for highly mobile solutions.
Now with other C2000 based systems having issues, it looks like Intel might be facing a major recall. This would be bad enough in the consumer market but a critical error in the enterprise. Even though Cisco might not be strictly responsible for this, they’ll have to mend some fences in the face of this issue.
Router Jockey comments:
Looks like the culprit in the recent Cisco debacle is the Intel Atom “System on Chip” (SoC) that Cisco used in it’s gear. My sources within Cisco won’t give up the goods, but many seem to be pointing to Cisco, although a single source at Cisco seemed to indicate there was another player included in this issue but wouldn’t comment. The real footing of these Intel accusations come from Intel itself. Back in Janurary 2017, they updated their spec document documenting an issue with the LPC clock on the Atom s2000, with no workaround and a system that is unable to boot, this depicts a grim outlook for our networking devices.
Read more at: Intel Atom SoC bricking more than Cisco products
