During its 43 years in business, Intel, the Santa Clara situated processor maker, has built an international reputation based on the high-quality x86-type processors it produces for personal computers, enterprise servers, storage arrays and other familiar IT machines.

With the proliferation of various types of connected devices into all corners of the globe and into all income groups, more chips and even more powerful variations thereof, are going to be needed to carry these ever-increasing data loads and deliver them in a timely fashion. These include thousands of devices that are not known for being in Intel’s marketing sweet spot.

For example, Intel is just beginning to supply chips for tablets and phones - by far the world’s fastest selling IT items. Addressing Intel’s investors earlier in 2011, CEO Paul Otellini said: “There’s been so much written about tablets that I don’t know where to start, except to say we’re on track.” “We are tracking 35 designs on multiple operating systems. Some are shipping now with Windows.

Intel is demonstrating some Android devices now and the tablet race is nowhere near finished. Intel’s ultimate goal is to be the microprocessor that’s inside every part of the data centre,” explained Otellini.
According to him, Intel intends to be the chip for all reasons, and the market will witness the first Intel-based phones (using new Medfield chips) in the first part 2012. In hindsight, Nokia was the wrong partner to have picked, he says.

Need for Performance
On the other side of this is the insatiable need for more and higher performance computing. The power, bandwidth and storage numbers get mind-boggling in the supercomputing sector, with large enterprises, scientific laboratories, government agencies and other sectors, clamouring for more processing power with overpowering demand. Unfazed by this demand, Intel wants to power all these yet-to-come connections with new generation, multi-integrated core (MIC) chips at every level: processors that will run all types of automated and human-driven devices from the creation of content to routers, to modems, to data centres, through processing and, finally, to storage. “We’re talking about all types of creational and networking devices, including sensors, videocams and scientific instruments — the whole gamut of IT. But it’s clear that everyone’s putting energy into it,” he said.

Otellini also said that, thanks to a well-ballyhooed partnership with Nokia that blew up in February 2011, Intel won’t be powering smartphones until sometime in 2012.

He stated: “We have freed up those (Nokia) resources and turned that design into a form factor/reference design.”

Getting Cloud Ready
Where there once were specialised chips doing random kinds of jobs, Intel plans to go there with its mainstream products. Its Xeonclass MIC processors, called the Intel Knights, are the frontline products in this initiative.

Kirk Skaugen, a 19-year Intel veteran, Vice President, Intel Architecture Group and GM, Data Centre and who has been whispered about as a possible future CEO, said, “About two years ago, we combined wired and networking, servers and storage, which had all been three divisions.” According to Skaugen, the piece that hadn’t been integrated was switching and routing, as well as communications infrastructure for the telcos. “The same similarities of standard Xeon hardware that happened in servers are happening in storage, as well as in the control plane of switching and routing,” he said.

In future, the integration of new Xeon processors will replace all the old chips. That’s also happening in communications infrastructure, Skaugen added
“So, there are many similarities of old RISC processors that are moving over to Xeon for the economies, performance and everything that we’ve put together,” Skaugen said.

Incremental to that, Intel also added the burgeoning embedded processor business, he added. “We have three pillars for (selling chips into) the cloud in our 2015 vision: the federated cloud, the automated cloud and the client-aware cloud,” he said. “When we’re going to connect 15 billion devices to the internet by 2015; and Ericsson is saying 50 billion devices by 2020; it’s important for us to know that whole connection.”

What Intel means by client awareness, Skaugen said, “is that when you detect a device at the end of a service, our belief is that you want to optimise the end-user experience, but you also want to optimise the cost of the service and the infrastructure it takes to deliver that service.”

“Where do you determine that client awareness?” he asked. “Does it happen at the bottom of a base station? Does it happen at the edge of the data centre in a switch? Does it happen in the server? We now have a play across the data centre to the device.”

This all fits into Intel’s automation pillar because the company already knows what kind of graphics are on the end of a client. “We can automate the type of server you can move a service to in the data centre,” he said. Intel chips are being used in 70 per cent of the storage controller market, and that number is moving closer to 80 per cent, according to Skaugen. “That’s commensurate with where we’re at in servers,” he said. “And our business with the top 10 networking companies is up 60 per cent in the last 18 months.

We’ve ported literally hundreds of applications from Sparc to IA (Intel architecture) over the last five years in the telecom industry. All of that new business is basically Xeon.

A Tall Order
So Skaugen and Intel, in general, have a lot of things to juggle, as far as supplying all sectors of IT related businesses with processors that work and can last a long time. It’s definitely a tall order, Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT and a long time Intel expert, told eWEEK. “There is continued momentum there for Intel. And when you look at the cloud services world — meaning Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft with Azure — they’re all running x86. There’s very little of non-x86 in all those operations. Intel is in a sweet spot in that it’s also pushing Unix into a smaller and smaller niche in a lot of markets,” said King.

At the same time, they’re considered the cutting-edge tech for this wave of cloud computing.
What Intel really has in mind is being the microprocessor inside literally every part of the data centre, King said. “That’s the long view,” he added. “And they’re working very hard to make that happen.”

Berjes Eric Shroff is Senior Manager, Information Technology, TATA Services Ltd.