Intel bends to the power of Google

THERE'S A VERY interesting story at News.com regarding Intel selling servers to Google.

According to the piece, based on an internal bog penned by Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger, Intel used a custom design to win the G-men's hearts. The search giant has a mixed estate but had recently been leaning to Opteron, the story says.

Gelsinger is quoted as saying Google, "went to the competitor's platform for the last four quarters of deployments… [but Intel designers] have been maniacal as we designed a unique board for them, developing a unique memory module with them".

OK, so Google is a gorgeous customer to have in terms of volumes and in PR terms so maybe Intel doesn't feel too bad that this story has leaked out, even if the customer will certainly ask for sub-micron margins and adopt a heartless, rip-and-replace attitude to datacentre hardware.

But a "unique board" and a "unique memory module" - what's going on here?

Google certainly owns a massive scale-out architecture but then so does any major search engine provider, portal, xSP, consumer web site and software-as-a-service company. Surely, these other customers would like to take a look at these "unique" designs. µ