Intel outlines data center strategy

Intel has outlined its strategy to re-architect the underlying infrastructure of data center, allowing enterprises and end-users to benefit from services-oriented mobile world.

Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) promises to increase the utilization and flexibility of the data center to deliver new services.

Rackspace Hosting is deploying new server racks that are a step toward reaching Intel’s RSA vision, powered by Intel Xeon processors and Intel Ethernet controllers with storage accelerated by Intel Solid State Drives.

The Rackspace design is the first commercial rack scale implementation.

Intel outlined its plan to optimize workloads, including customized CPU and SoC configurations.

As part of its strategy, Intel revealed new details for the forthcoming Intel Atom processors C2000 product family aimed for low-energy, high-density microservers and storage (codenamed Avoton), and network devices (codenamed Rangeley).

Intel’s 64-bit SoCs will be out later this year and will be based on its 22nm process technology and Silvermont microarchitecture. It will feature up to eight cores with Ethernet and support for up to 64GB of memory.

Intel’s new products are expected to deliver up to four times the energy efficiency and up to seven times more performance than the first generation Intel Atom processor-based server SoCs introduced in December last year.

Roadmap for Expansion

The move to services-oriented datacenters presents opportunities for Intel to expand into new segments.

Intel outlined roadmap of next-generation products based on its 14nm process technology scheduled for 2014 and beyond. These products are aimed at microservers, storage and network devices and will offer an even broader set of low-power, high-density solutions for their Web-scale applications and services.

The future products include the next generation of Intel Xeon processors E3 family (codenamed Broadwell) built for processor and graphic-centric workloads such as online gaming and media transcoding.

It includes the next generation of Intel Atom processor SoCs (codenamed Denverton) that will enable even higher density deployments for datacenter operators.

Intel disclosed an addition to its future roadmap – a SoC designed from the ground up for the datacenter based on Intel’s Broadwell microarchitecture that follows Haswell microarchitecture. This SoC will offer higher levels of performance in high density, energy efficient systems.

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