In November 2016, Google and Intel announced a strategic working partnership to try and bring on board enterprise companies to Google Cloud Platform through datacenter innovation. A new development now shows that Google Cloud Platform will be the first cloud infrastructure service to offer Intel’s new Xeon processors, dubbed Skylake, to its cloud clients in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
It’s a known fact that Intel is the dominant player in the server hardware market, and has already graduated to Kaby Lake on consumer desktop devices. But, until now, Intel Broadwell processors, its fifth-generation chipsets, have been the datacenter hardware of choice. One of the reasons is that Broadwell is more affordable than Skylake.
Google and Intel are setting out to change that, and are now offering Skylake with Intel Advanced Vector Extensions – AVX-512 – which “doubles the floating-point performance for the heaviest calculations,” according to Urs Hölzle, SVP of Google Cloud Infrastructure, who says that it is “ideal for scientific modeling, genomic research, 3D rendering, data analytics and engineering simulation.”
Skylake will be immediately available on Google Cloud Platform across five of its regions in the United States and overseas: Western US, Eastern US, Central US, Western Europe and Eastern Asia Pacific.
As Intel moves its datacenter focus from Broadwell to Skylake, we can’t ignore the fact that AMD is coming in hard and fast with its Naples processor later in 2017. The refreshed competition from AMD is definitely something we’ll be following closely in the months to come, but what’s even more intriguing is the speed at which Google is moving on the cloud front.
After sitting on the sidelines for so many years despite being one of the earliest adopters of cloud technology for its own infrastructure needs, Google’s cloud division, headed ably by Diane Greene, is finally making up for lost time.
Stay tuned.
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