Buttering No Parsnips: Google Says Nice Things About Intel's Chips
CNBC and others are reporting that Intel and Google have renewed vows, albeit in the vaguest ways. As CNBC wrote, "No financial terms were disclosed, nor did the companies provide a timeline for the agreement." I don't see press releases in the companies' online press rooms, indicating how important this announcement is to them.
Google will keep using Intel's IPU--their name for smart Ethernet controllers like Nvidia Bluefield--and Xeon processors. I'm skeptical of the latter. It's not that Google won't use Xeon but rather that it will be one of several processor families including AMD Epyc and Google's Arm-based Axion. Epyc has had the x86 momentum, and Arm has emerged as the dominant architecture for accelerated AI (e.g., TPU) clusters and is gaining share in general-purpose computing.
