Intel enterprise marketing director Shannon Poulin has been talking to a lot of web hosts to figure out their server needs - and what they require to play ball with large players like Amazon or Google.
Poulin said in the opening keynote of WebhostingDay 2009 that, while premium-branded servers bring value in their own right, Intel will be rolling out new, smaller server form factors, more use of flash memory, and the ability to adjust power levels to optimal levels.
“Those are the three areas we’re going to focus on: energy efficiency, performance and virtualization,”
The focus of this three-pronged approach, however, is less on flashy new technologies, but rather on reducing total cost of ownership, and Poulin sees hardware as the best way to reduce TCO.
“Not to pick on software, but when look at TCO, there’s lots of choice in hardware,” Poulin said.
As well, Intel is introducing a lot of new hardware options over the coming year, building servers with more sophisticated multi-core threading. Turbo Boost Technology is one of the new features Intel has built into latest-generation Intel microarchitecture (codenamed Nehalem), allowing processor cores to run faster than the base operating frequency if it’s operating below power, current, and temperature specification limits.
This year, Intel is also bringing hyper-threading to the fore, offering simultaneous multithreading implementation in their Pentium 4, Atom, and Core i7 CPUs to improve parallelization of computations (ie. doing multiple tasks at once). Hyper-threading lets a processor be treated by theoperating system as two processors instead of one, meaning that the operating system sees and shares the workload between the two virtual processors.
While any corporate presentation is bound to have elements that make it seem like a sales pitch, Poulin gave the audience an idea of the direction of cutting-edge server development in the coming months.
