Intel and AMD Follow in Footsteps of Mysterious Google Switch

▤ Summary

Take it as a sign of how the complex computer systems that power everything from Gmail to Apples iCloud are being remade to handle the massive bunches of data caroming around todays internet. When youre adding servers by the truckload and those devices are spending most of their time talking to each other, you get a pretty clear idea of what you need a networking switch to do, and long ago, Google realized it had to build its own. "We believe that there is no other way to solve some of these challenges without starting to integrate the fabric in the CPU platform," says Raj Hazra, Intel vice president and general manager of high performance computing. This is something that the supercomputer crowd has been begging chipmakers to deliver for years, says John Shalf, the department head for computer science at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Add companies like Google, and Apple, Microsoft, and others to the mix – Internet giants that collectively snatch up an estimated 10 percent of the server market just to power their data centers – and things look a little different.

▦ Linked Companies

Intel Corporation

$1B+

AMD

$25M to $50M