Navin Shenoy, executive vice president at Intel, introduced more than 50 new products yesterday at Intel’s “data-centric” event in San Francisco. They range from the second-generation Xeon Scalable flagship processor to the Optane memory chips that will dramatically improve the capacity and density of data storage.
Shenoy said those products are necessary to feed the beast of demand for cloud-based services, from Netflix movies on demand to sensor analysis for self-driving cars.
The trends fueling the data-centric world include a proliferation of cloud computing, the growth of AI and analytics, and cloudification of the network and the edge. In the past five years, Intel saw a 50 percent increase in compute demand, and it predicts the same again in the next five years.
The demand for diverse workloads is increasing. So Intel has been investing to move data faster with Ethernet and silicon photonics, store more with Optane products, and process everything with CPUs, FPGAs, and custom chips. And for once, Intel isn’t trickling out its products. It’s launching them all at once. I talked with Shenoy at the event.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Navin Shenoy: You heard a lot from us today. The general high-level view of the company is we’ve been transforming for three or four years now. Hopefully you saw today’s announcements reflecting that transformation. Architecting the future of the data center and the edge requires, we think, a broader approach: move data faster, store more data, process everything. We’ve obviously, for a number of years now, built out that portfolio, but we never tried to bring it all together. That’s what today was about.
We’re on a journey. I told my team today, “Welcome to the starting line.” We’re on a journey to get after solving customer problems in moving data faster, storing more data, and processing everything. Today’s the first step.
VentureBeat: Why does today feel different from, say, product launches that happened six months or a year or two years ago?
Shenoy: Historically we would have introduced seven new products at seven different events at seven different times. We would have had our individual product teams talking about the virtues and benefits of their products in isolation. Two or three years ago we started to recognize that, if you start from the workload and work your way backward – if you start from the customer problem and work your way backward – you can’t do that. You have to think about the problem holistically and try to solve it holistically. You miss opportunities if you don’t think about it that way.
The Twitter example today is a great example. I saw Matt talk about this privately at an event last summer. I asked him if he would come today and talk about how they found a bottleneck that they didn’t realize they had, by introducing the caching tier in their infrastructure with NAND. And how that then transformed the way they thought about compute resources. They didn’t realize there were storage bottlenecks, and they couldn’t take advantage of the CPU infrastructure. It’s a great example of reduction in TCO, reducing the footprint in the data center, and improving performance by using a higher-end CPU and introducing a new cache. You can imagine we’re working together with them on further ways to re-architect things as we think about the future.
We’re having that conversation hundreds of times a week with hundreds and thousands of customers. If you really want to figure out how to architect the future of the data center and the edge, you have to do it holistically, end to end, from the interconnect to the memory and storage to the compute.
VentureBeat: Have you updated your revenue number as far as where AI revenue for the company is?
Shenoy: No, we haven’t. We disclosed $1 billion in 2017. We haven’t updated it since. You can imagine that it’s growing fast. You can imagine that it’s growing faster than the baseline revenue of the company.
