The VAR Guy

As if Intel couldn’t be any larger, the microchip company plans to acquire “certain assets” of QLogic’s InfiniBand networking portfolio. But what will Intel do with networking technology? Here are a few ideas …

Intel’s interest in QLogic’s InfiniBand technology is deep. According to Intel’s release, “[a] significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join Intel.” That’s a large influx of resources to Intel, and Intel says it’ll need them to meet “ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018.” By the way, ExaFLOP/s, according to Intel, is “a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.”

How high performance networking equipment will translate into processor production is a bit of a mystery, but the secret likely lies in the silicon chips that power the InfiniBand products. If Intel melds this technology with its existing processor technology, it could lead to more-efficient CPUs. Intel also could be looking to incorporate the technology on mobile system-on-a-chip CPUs, or something inside motherboard chipsets. Intel’s official explanation is the technology will help build a “scalable system fabric needed to execute” the evolution to ExaFLOP speed. (No flux capacitor necessary.)

Have another idea? Will Intel build Skynet or will IBM beat them to it? Chime in and let us know.

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