Although Intel is fast at work with its many-core architecture push, they claim that when it comes to cloud hardware, their Xeon is the reigning champion.
According to Intel, the processor is seeing widespread adoption in enterprise hardware but they assume this will evolve as the demands for lower power consumption and mounting numbers of parallel applications for the cloud pop up.
According to Alan Priestly, Intel’s Enterprise Marketing Manager, “When IT organizations are moving to the cloud, they’re typically moving from Xeon architectures…we need capacity in the cloud to take the workloads that we’ve got in legacy data centers today and run it in cloud-like environments. That’s where Xeon fits in.
Intel has suggested that its upcoming MIC and single-chip cloud computer projects will bring in 48-cores but for cloud or other purposes, developing code architectures that can distribute programs across all of these cores and chips is still going to be a challenge.
As Priestly said, “The 48-core scheme is purely for research, to allow people to play with code compilers.”