Intel Introduces Custom Cloud Chip

Grazec from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Intel is solving a tough business problem, using a little technical innovation. The company said Wednesday that it would enable its Xeon processor, used inside big computing environments, to handle a customer’s large-scale proprietary algorithms as if the chip were customized for that process.

The idea is to enable some of computing’s biggest workloads, like security for a telecommunications company, or Facebook’s widely used homepage, to work faster across thousands of computer servers at once. Provided those are servers with this Xeon chip. Taking advantage of the optimized chip, “applications should work twice as fast as before,” said Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data center group. “As cloud computing grows, the infrastructure of it has to change.”…

So does Intel, which is coping with a massive slowdown in personal computer sales in part by focusing on its servers and data center business. In the most recent quarter, the data center group was Intel’s second-largest operation. Its revenues of $3.1 billion, a rise of 11 percent from a year earlier, were less than the PC Group’s $7.9 billion, but sales of chips for PCs were off by 1 percent. Total revenue was $12.8 billion…

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