The new chip, which is called Mount Evans and will be sold
to others beyond Google, reflects the way that cloud computing providers
operate. They build huge data centers full of powerful physical computers and
sell virtual slices of those machines to other businesses, who in turn get
better bang for the buck than building the machines themselves.
For cloud providers, tasks like setting up the virtual
machines and getting customer data to the right place are essentially overhead
costs. The Mount Evans chip, which Google and Intel have dubbed an
"infrastructure processing unit" (IPU), separates those tasks out
from the main computing tasks and speeds them up. Doing so also helps ensure
the safety of those functions against hackers and adds flexibility to the data
center.
"We see this as strategically vital. It's an extremely
important area for us and for the data center," 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 Intel and Google are working together on a set of
software tools that will be released for free in hopes of making Intel's
version of the chip a broader industry standard used beyond Google's data
centers.
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 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.
"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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment