Together with Alphabet's Google Cloud, Intel Corp has created a new lineup of microchips that it hopes will become a key seller in the fast growing cloud computing sector.
"Mount Evans," the new chip that Google will market to other companies, will replicate cloud computing providers. Building massive data centers full of powerful physical computers and selling virtual slices of those machines to other businesses allows them to obtain a better return on their investment than they would if they created the systems themselves.
For cloud service providers, processes such as configuring virtual machines and transferring customer data to the appropriate location are effectively overhead expenses.
The Mount Evans chip, which has been called an "infrastructure processing unit" (IPU) by Google and Intel, separates those tasks from the core computational tasks and speeds up the performance of those tasks.
In addition, doing so helps to protect the security of such functions from hackers while also increasing the flexibility of the data center.
Nick McKeown, senior vice president of Intel's network and edge group, told Reuters that the company views this as a strategically important area.
Intel isn't the only company that makes infrastructure-related processors. When it comes to graphics cards, Nvidia Corp and Marvell Technology have similar but slightly different offerings.
Intel and Google, on the other hand, are collaborating on a set of software tools that will be made available for free in the aim of making Intel's version of the chip a more widely accepted industry standard that is utilized outside of Google's network infrastructure.
"We hope to spur a technology trend that will make it easier for all data center 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," Amin Vahdat, a Google fellow and vice president of engineering, said in a statement.
The fundamental question of what constitutes a server will extend beyond what is contained within the sheet metal, Vahdat said. The International Puppet Union (IPU) will play a key part in this, he said.
