Intel Outlines Its Strategy for Re-Architecting the Data Center

by Jeffrey Burt

The efforts Intel is making—from its workload-optimized silicon and extension into areas such as networking and storage to its custom chip-making efforts and Rack Scale Architecture—are designed to push the industry toward software-defined infrastructures, Bryant said.

Waxman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Cloud Platform Group, holds up a 22-nanometer “Avoton” Atom SoC aimed at microservers. Intel currently is shipping samples of the chip to customers and will launch it later this year. Avoton will offer up to four times the energy efficiency and seven times the performance of the first Atom SoC for microservers, the S1200 Centerton SoC, which launched in December 2012.

The chip maker’s evolving Rack Scale Architecture calls for creating physical disaggregation between the computing elements in the server, eventually reaching the point where all the resources are essentially pooled. Intel currently is looking to have the systems within the rack share more resources, including power, cooling and I/O. Intel’s Waxman shows off a prototype rack of three server modules powered by Xeon chips with the shared resources in the mezzanine area at the top of the rack.

Intel engineers are working on improving photonics technology for networking. Pictured here is a silicon optics cable.

Intel officials also want Atom-based server modules to be able to leverage the rack architecture. Pictured here is a demo rack that includes 30 modules powered by the Avoton Atom chips. At the top of the rack is the mezzanine with the shared resources.

One of the 30 Avoton-based server modules in the company’s demo rack is pictured here.

The two Intel executives were among several who took the stage during the data center conference to field questions from analysts and journalists.

Rajeeb Hazra, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Technical Computing Group, discusses innovation in high-performance computing, an increasingly important market for the chip maker. As Intel technology helps increase the performance of HPC systems while driving down the costs, it gives more organizations access to supercomputing capabilities.

Ron Kasabian, general manager of Intel’s Big Data Solutions, discusses the company’s strategy to unlock the intelligence in big data.