In hopes of making Intel’s version of the data centre chip a broader industry standard used beyond Google’s data centres, Intel and Google are working together on a set of software tools that will be released for free
On Wednesday, Intel Corp and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud said they have worked together to create a new category of data centre chip that Intel hopes will become a major seller in the booming cloud computing market.
The new data centre chip, which is called Mount Evans and reflects the way that cloud computing providers operate, will be sold to others beyond Google. They build huge data centres full of powerful physical computers and sell virtual slices of those machines to other businesses, which in turn get better bang for the buck than building the machines themselves.
Tasks like setting up the virtual machines and getting customer data to the right place, for cloud providers, are essentially overhead costs. From the main computing tasks, data centre chip – the Mount Evans, which Google and Intel have dubbed an “infrastructure processing unit” (IPU), separates those tasks and speeds them up. Doing so also helps ensure the safety of those functions against hackers and adds flexibility to the data centre.
“We see this as strategically vital. It’s an extremely important area for us and for the data centre”, Nick McKeown, senior vice president of the network and edge group at Intel, told Reuters.
Intel is not the only player making infrastructure chips. Nvidia Corp and Marvell Technology Inc. have similar but slightly different offerings.
But, in hopes of making Intel’s version of the data centre chip a broader industry standard used beyond Google’s data centres, Intel and Google are working together on a set of software tools that will be released for free.
Amin Vahdat, a Google fellow and vice president of engineering, said Google is hoping to spur a technology trend that makes it easier for all data centre operators to be more flexible about how they slice up their physical computer servers into virtual ones to suit whatever computing task is at hand.
“The basic question of what is a server is going to go beyond what’s inside the sheet metal. The IPU is going to play a central role there”, Vahdat told Reuters.
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