GigaOM Pro

When AMD’s acquisition of SeaMicro went down in March, Intel said that it had no interest in the deal and that it was working on developing its own proprietary server fabric that would improve the efficiency of its servers. Well, the chip maker opened up this morning, saying that it would integrate a fabric controller into its Xeon servers over the next few years. Server fabrics allow more distributed computing by easily ferrying data between storage and multiple servers. They’re a critical part of the modern data center and cloud computing. Over the past decade Intel has integrated the memory controller and the graphics processor right into the main CPU and this latest move will take it to the next level. This is yet another sign that individual PC sales will only take the company so far. And that the cloud data center is becoming critical to business, not to mention the fact that energy efficiency is arguably now the most important server trait in a world where servers have comparable clock speeds.