Intel has announced that it is working on integrating its Xeon processors with programmable chips to provide big techies like Facebook and Google with more flexibility to optimize their servers when necessary.
Speaking at Gigaom Structure 2014 in San Francisco on Wednesday, Diane Bryant, the senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s data centre group, said the company is working on launching a new program that will offer customizable Xeon processors, enabling users to configure the chips for their particular workloads.
The program will integrate Intel’s Xeon processors with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology enabling users to customize and program the chips to speed up their own critical algorithms for a better performance. As the chips will be reprogrammable companies will be able to adapt to their servers according to their workloads over time.
Bryant said, “This is an example of Intel leading a massive transformation at the silicon level of the data centre to drive increased value to our customers.”
“Our new Xeon+FPGA solution provides yet another customised option, one more tool for customers to use to improve their critical data centre metric of ‘Performance/TCO’. It highlights our commitment to delivering the very best solutions across all data centre workloads and our passion to lead in the transformation of the industry to cloud services.”
Bryant added that this year the company plans to manufacture over 30 customized chip designs. However, she declined to reveal as when the company will ship the chips or name of the Intel customers that are currently testing it out.
