Intel and Google Cloud team up to launch Mount Evans chips to boost data center performance

Intel Corp and Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud said on Tuesday they have unveiled a co-designed chip that could make data centers more secure and efficient. The E2000 chip, code-named Mount Evans, took over the work of packing data for the network card from the expensive central processing unit (CPU), which was originally responsible for the calculations.

The chip also provides better security between different customers who may share CPUs in the cloud, said Amin Vahdat, vice president of engineering at Google.

The E2000 chip is made up of basic processors called cores. There may be hundreds of cores on a chip, so sometimes information is lost between them. For environments where network data transmission reliability is critical, the E2000 creates a secure route for each core to prevent this from happening.

Businesses and institutions around the world are running increasingly complex algorithms and ever-larger datasets at a time when performance improvements in chips such as CPUs are slowing. Therefore, cloud computing companies are looking for ways to make the data center itself more productive.

While the new chip was co-developed with Google, Nick McKeon, who leads Intel's networking and edge group, said Intel could also choose to sell the E2000 to other customers.

Google Cloud is about to start offering the E2000 in a new product called the C3 VM, which will be powered by Intel's fourth-generation Xeon processors. The Xeon chips are Intel's most powerful CPUs right now, and Google Cloud is the first cloud service to deploy the latest generation of these chips, Intel said.