Intel and Google Cloud team up to develop chip for data centers

Intel and Google Cloud announced this Wednesday (28) that they will work together to create a new category of chip that Intel hopes will become a popular product in the growing cloud computing market.

The new chip, which is called Mount Evans, will be sold to third parties besides Google. For data center providers, tasks such as setting up virtual machines and putting customer data in the right place are essentially out-of-pocket expenses.

The Mount Evans chip, which Google and Intel dubbed the “infrastructure processing unit” (IPU), separates these tasks from the main steps of computing and accelerates them. It also helps to ensure the security of these 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 Intel’s network and edge computing group, told Reuters.

The chip maker isn’t the only company that makes infrastructure chips. Nvidia Corp and Marvell Technology 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 chip version a broader industry standard used beyond Google’s data centers.

Amin Vahdat, Google’s vice president of engineering, said the company hopes to spur a technology trend that makes it easier for all data center operators to be more flexible about how to divide their physical servers into virtual ones to suit any type of computing .

“The basic question of what a server is goes beyond what’s inside the metal box. The IPU will play a central role there,” Vahdat told Reuters.