Intel unveiled a new product line that combines the company's Xeon chips with customizable field-programmable data array chips, in a move to address the needs of cloud service providers and carriers for better performance.
The announcement was made by Diane Bryant, Intel data center group senior vice president, at the GigaOm Structure conference.
Bryant said that the product has been in development for around a year, and that the company has been working together with several companies on the project.
"We are engaged with many of the large cloud service providers as well as the telecommunications service providers, the carriers," said Bryant, who refused to identify Intel's partner companies for the project's development.
The Xeon 5 processors of Intel will be customized with FPGA, making it possible for the chips to change rapidly in accordance to the application needs. Companies that use millions of applications that are spread out over different servers will benefit greatly from such customizable processors.
The FPGA chip will not be placed near the Xeon processor, the usual way of using accelerator chips, but rather will be linked to the Xeon to increase performance as the FPGA will also share available memory with the CPU.
By using the new products, companies may be able to lower their cost of operations, along with making their businesses more agile. Performance can be boosted by 10 times, and even up to 20 times.
"With these FPGA solutions, it's truly dynamic," Bryant said. "You can reprogram for a different program or a different algorithm on the fly."
Intel, however, is not revealing the company that is manufacturing the FPGA chips.
Bryant added that Intel's development of this product is motivated by the competition that the company is facing for its chips in the form of server vendors that use low-power ARM chips.
"We will always have competition; we're not naive to that," said Bryant. "We are extremely paranoid about competition. We have invested heavily in adding product lines to make sure compute, storage and networking workloads run well on Intel."
Bryant noted that their customers do not like relying on just one source for their needs in information technology. However, when companies look to different vendors for their chips, the process becomes more complex and expensive.
This new product line will help Intel set itself as a vendor that can cater to all the processor needs of large customers.
