Intel paid $140 million on Tuesday to buy the interconnect business of Cray, the original manufacturer of supercomputers. From here it looks like there’s little left of Cray moving forward, but the interesting bit about this deal isn’t what it means for Cray (and maybe supercomputing) but what it could mean for webscale and the next iteration of servers. Because this deal and AMD’s buy of SeaMicro last month is all about the fabrics.
Chipmakers have been busily adding cores to their servers, but getting those cores to communicate without creating bottlenecks is a huge problem. And as the Web scales to reach billions of people, who are spending more time using online services, the infrastructure supporting those services is reaching a breaking point. Data centers that used to be the size of a corner gas station are now the size of a WalMart distribution center. Inside those centers are more servers containing many, many more CPU cores.
via GigaOM
April 26, 2012
