Amazon is Intel's second major 18A customer
AWS orders an "AI Fabric Chip" with 18A manufacturing technology from Intel. Customized Xeon CPUs are also part of the Intel deal.
Not a wafer that AWS would order from Intel. You can see unknown chips with a rough production structure.
(Image: c't)
Luckily for Intel and its chip contract manufacturer subsidiary Intel Foundry: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the second industry heavyweight after Microsoft to commit to the chip manufacturer. While all details remain unknown at Microsoft apart from the intended manufacturing process 18A, the AWS announcement is slightly more extensive.
According to this, it is a multi-year agreement with a value of several billion US dollars. Intel is producing an "AI Fabric Chip" for AWS with its own 18A manufacturing technology, i.e. something like an "AI network chip". After the first generation, Intel expects further iterations with the improved manufacturing process 18AP – the P stands for performance – and later with the new generation 14A.
"AI Fabric Chip" can mean all sorts of things, such as network processors that feed data packets to AI accelerators. This would be a suitable test candidate for a new design collaboration, as a data center uses significantly fewer network processors than CPUs or accelerators. If things go bumpy in the design phase, it wouldn't be too serious. Cisco has become a cloud heavyweight with its own networking products.
Intel's best-case scenario would be the upcoming Amazon Graviton processors with ARM cores from its own foundry. This would represent a prestige project that could attract additional customers.
Custom Xeons
Before Intel Foundry produces the above-mentioned chips for AWS, Intel is launching customized Xeon 6 processors with Intel 3 technology for the cloud operator. It is not known whether these are customized Granite Rapids (up to 128 performance cores) or Sierra Forest (up to 288 efficiency cores).
There is also no information about the degree of customization. Minor adjustments to the firmware and even changes to the individual chiplets are conceivable. Specification adjustments have always been normal for major customers, such as a desired combination of clock frequency and electrical power consumption that is not covered by any standard model.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmmung wird hier ein externer Preisvergleich (heise Preisvergleich) geladen.
Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen (heise Preisvergleich) übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.
(mma)
