Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is one of the world’s biggest buyers of servers and data centers. For obvious reasons, they need powerful servers to facilitate the services they offer to clients such as cloud storage, email and search, to name a few.
In fact, since 2013, Google has spent $2.35 billion on these types of expenses. On Monday night, Gordon MacKean, a senior director at Google and the chairman of the OpenPower Foundation that’s dedicated to shared designs around the processor design, published a photo on Google+ showing a Google motherboard with IBM’s Power8 chip.
This might be bad news for Intel, who owes much of its growth to Google. MacKean also posted, “Today I’m excited to show off a Google Power8 server motherboard in the OpenPower booth at the [IBM] Impact 2014 conference in Las Vegas. We’re always looking to deliver the highest quality of service for our users, and so we built this server to port our software stack to Power.”
IBM’s Power8 chip came as a response to Intel’s Xeon chips. It took three years and $2.4 billion to design. Intel has been following the “scale out” model where more of its chips were installed in a farm of low-end servers. IBM wants to go the route of a smaller number of more powerful and centralized machines.
Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group wrote in a blog post last year, “If a company is only using a few thousand servers, it doesn’t pay for them to invest in hardware R&D to achieve a competitive advantage. But if they’re buying hundreds of thousands or even millions of servers, the balance might tip in favor of hardware innovation.”
