Intel teams with Google Cloud to develop new class of data center chip

Intel Corp and Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud on Wednesday said they have worked together to create a new category of chip that Intel hopes will become a major seller in the booming cloud computing market.

The new chip, which is called Mount Evans and will be sold to others beyond Google, reflects the way that cloud computing providers operate. They build huge data centers full of powerful physical computers and sell virtual slices of those machines to other businesses, who in turn get better bang for the buck than building the machines themselves.

For cloud providers, tasks like setting up the virtual machines and getting customer data to the right place are essentially overhead costs. The Mount Evans chip, which Google and Intel have dubbed an "infrastructure processing unit" (IPU), separates those tasks out from the main computing tasks and speeds them up. Doing so also helps ensure the safety of those functions against hackers and adds flexibility to the data center.