The cloud wars are in full force and hardware vendors are carefully choosing their alliances. And cloud infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) just got a star player on its team, with Intel’s announcement that they have designed custom Xeon processors to power AWS’s new server instances.
Designed specifically for Amazon’s EC2 services, the chips will purportedly offer the highest level of CPU performance the Web service has ever utilized. The announcement comes about seven months after Google, a longstanding Intel (News - Alert) customer, hinted that they would be using IBM’s (News - Alert) Power8 processor at the core of their home-built server board for the cloud.
Of course, AWS and Google are still in the preview/prototype stage so nothing is set in stone. But Intel does have a proven track record of customizing processors for players like Oracle, Facebook (News - Alert) and eBay. In fact, Intel purports 15 custom CPU designs last year with more than double that in the works this year.
IBM has taken a different strategy with its open Power chip architecture, and Taiwanese hardware company Tyan has used it to power its Palmetto system, which features the motherboard it touted with Google earlier in the year. IBM also recently announced it was going head to head with Intel by incorporating technology from NVIDIA into its server chips. However, IBM is looking at 2016 to ship these servers, while Intel actually has a spec, along with a monster cloud partnership with AWS.
Not one to be left behind in the cloud wars, Microsoft (News - Alert) also released the second-generation design for its own home-grown cloud servers just a few weeks ago. Redmond is also banking on an open approach and its Open Cloud Server (OCS v2) uses standardized components and interfaces and has already been tested in Microsoft data centers. Oh, and the dual-processor design uses Intel’s Xeon E5-2600v3 Haswell processors.
The new custom AWS CPU is also based on the Haswell architecture, and has been dubbed Intel Xeon E5-2666v3. Amazon says that while it runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz, it can be boosted up to 3.5 GHz, and is also built using minuscule 22-nanometer process technology. It is set to run in Virtual Private Cloud environments only, according to AWS.
So Intel is becoming pretty firmly entrenched in the cloud infrastructure space, where smaller and faster processing is the name of the game. IBM is certainly still in the race, although the role they will play is not clearly defined yet. There are rumors that Google chose IBM for its server board prototype simply to try to drive down Intel’s pricing. Google’s next move in the cloud wars could prove critical for all the hardware vendors involved.