Intel Says Half of Public Clouds to Have Custom Processors

The world's most prominent businesses have diverse and often specific requirements, for the operations of their data centers. They may need interoperability between thousands of servers, custom routing mechanisms, and processors made to complete specific tasks. At least concerning processors, Intel is providing global businesses with custom builds that cater to their exact needs. It says half the world's public clouds will contain custom chips in the coming year.

Yes, 2015 will be year of customization—a far cry from the mass-produced millions of processors that companies such as AMD and Intel once made for personal PCs and data centers alike. Customization is now the order of the day, reports the New York Times, which noted that Intel sells about 18 million chips annually. It is the vast types of services that companies provide these days that drive the need for customization. From Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, one may see them sell computing power and storage space. From Facebook and other social giants, one may see services that interconnect a wide range of consumers. And Intel is answering their calls.

Diane Bryant, the head of Intel's data center business, said her company never says no.

“We have never said no to a custom solution. We get orders from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands,” Bryant commented on orders for custom chips.

TMC recently wrote about the new Altoona data center Facebook has built to service its millions of customers that browse its social networking site every day. Setups such as those may require chips that can handle specific workloads. If IT knows that certain servers or data centers will only manage a specific range of tasks, they can have processors that know how to handle those tasks better than a generic processor could.

In addition, data centers typically consume a lot of power. Therefore, custom chips that can lower the power they use each day can add up to a lot of monetary savings for companies which they can pass to their customers. KitGuru notes that Intel plans to include intellectual property into its standard microprocessors and that it will begin to match AMD's semi-custom chips with fully-custom chips of its own for at least 10 interested businesses that desire both high-performance and low-power x86 cores.

Edited by Maurice Nagle