INTEL + ADRC = FIRE As Jason Waxman, general manager of the...

INTEL + ADRC = FIRE

As Jason Waxman, general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group within the Data Center Group at Intel, said during his keynote at the Open Compute Summit a few weeks ago, by 2025 Intel anticipates that 70 percent to 80 percent of all servers shipped will be deployed in large scale datacenters, which Intel qualified as being one with thousands of systems and one that is engaged in infrastructure, platform, or software services; this includes the big cloud providers as well as smaller players, the service providers and telcos that compete against them, and the hyperscalers that provide their own infrastructure for their consumer and customer facing applications. Last year, Intel’s cloud server chip business grew by more than 40 percent, with sales of CPUs aimed at enterprise customers down slightly and the remaining hodge podge of HPC, workstation, networking, and storage collectively growing at around 10 percent. Each of these segments is projected to account for about a third of CPU revenues this year and Intel is forecasting that cloud sales (using the broadest definition as above) will see more than a 20 percent growth rate annually through 2019.

These are Intel’s most advanced customers, and they are driving the designs of the new “Broadwell” Xeon E5 v4 processors, launched at the end of March, and the future “Skylake” Xeon E5 v5 processors, expected sometime by the end of 2017. Of the top seven hyperscalers and cloud builders –  Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba – five are in Intel’s early ship program and five have custom processors; four of them are sampling hybrid Broadwell-FPGA units and two are looking at Intel’s implementation of silicon photonics.
To take the pulse of the hyperscalers and big cloud builders, who are secretive about their infrastructure except when it suits their needs, The Next Platform sat down with Waxman to get some perspective on what is driving these customers and how they are in turn driving Intel. The first thing that Waxman did was caution us about making generalities.
“The trap about cloud service providers,” explains Waxman, “is that depending on who you talk to, you will get a completely different view of the world. You can talk to a Google or a Facebook, but we have to look at it as sort of the whole in an aggregate.”

The first thing that happened when the hyperscalers and cloud builders started to get really large and needed to work more closely with Intel is that everybody went down the wrong technology roadmap for a bit – even big IT organizations with the smartest people in the world weave when they should bob sometimes.