US based tech giant Intel has today unveiled its new range of microprocessors for data centers as competition intensifies in the business of manufacturing hardware to support and power cloud computing. Going up against the likes of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), among others, Intel will hope that the performance of their latest Xeon Scalable Processor chips will give them an edge over their rivals in a rapidly-growing, lucrative market.
Vice President of Intel’s artificial intelligence products group, Naveen Rao, says the company’s new Xeon chips have been designed to provide unmatched support for next-generation computing applications like artificial intelligence (AI) and driverless car technology.
The Xeon chips will predominantly target customers that operate their own data centers with thousands of computers, in the process enabling them to power their own services. Additionally, the chips will also provide adequate computing horsepower to those customers who do not own or maintain their own data centers.
Several large scale corporations like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the cloud computing market, are primed to utilize the Xeon Scalable Processor chips in the near future. The data centers that run Google’s cloud platform Azure will officially be the first to implement the chips, with Project Manager for Google Compute Engine, Paul Nash, describing the move as:
An expansion and deepening of our partnership with Intel.
Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner, says the new Intel processors are a step up from the previous generation, boasting better power efficiency, improvement in artificial intelligence workload and more advanced storage. However, Intel will likely face stiff competition from historic rival AMD, which recently launched its own next-generation data center processor.