Dont Forget That Intel still Owns the Data Center

This is a reprint (more or less) of Tuesdays ARCHITECHT Daily newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every morning.Intel released its Xeon Skylake processor family on Tuesday, and along with the announcement come the now-common claims about how Intel is struggling against growing competition and how its late to the artificial intelligence party.

Much like with claims about Apples impending demise, I would argue that doom is in the eye of the beholder. Profits and market share might slip maybe temporarily, maybe permanently but there is still a whole lot of money to be made.There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which, with regard to AI, Ive laid out here before.

But the boiled down version is that were still very early in terms of AI adoption and applications. Even if Nvidia forever owns the training of AI models on its GPUs, Intel has plenty of space to operate in cars, industrial devices, wearables and everyplace else that experts predict we will see embedded chips specialized for AI tasks. Of course, Intel is also investing heavily in its own AI and high-performance architectures, and isnt ready to cede those spaces to Nvidia just yet.

Here are a handful of previous newsletter posts on this topic:Intel is doubling down on computer visionIntels new AI group and the hardware renaissanceHow long will the good times last for Nvidia?Nvidias AI beast, Microsofts global database, and Chinas OSS opportunityGoogles AI tech lead is for real, but that wont be enough in the cloudIts also worth noting that SaaS services and other applications that utilize AI algorithms will run, as well as big-data processing workloads, will likely continue to run on data center CPUs for the foreseeable future. AI is through-the-roof hot right now, but AI workloads that presently benefit from (but dont technically require) GPUs are only a blip on the radar of total data center workloads.

Intel presently owns an estimated 96 percent of that market. While Nvidias data center revenue more than doubled to $409 million in Q1 2017, Intel grew only 6 percent but did reach $4.2 billion.

Cloud computing is only growing, too, and cloud providers including AWS, Google and DigitalOcean have all publicly announced the availability of the new Intel processors on their clouds. Theres really no doubt that other cloud providers will also offer them in due time, if theyre not already. Selling at mega-scale to cloud providers is a lower-margin business for Intel than selling servers to every company under the sun, but its a big business that is not going away.

For more details on Intels new chips (which it claims offer 1.6 times more performance than the previous generation) and more takes on Intels business, check out the following items. And please try not to shed too many tears (at least not just yet) for the company currently ranked 47 on the Fortune 500:Intel, while pivoting to artificial intelligence, tries to protect lead (New York Times)Intel counterpunches with new data center chips (Fortune)Intel looks to maintain its data center dominance with powerful new server chips (GeekWire)For a deep dive into the architecture: The x86 battle lines drawn with Intels Skylake launch (The Next Platform)One other quick note HyTrust not previously a company I knew much about, but I knew of DataGravity because its co-founder and CEO Paula Long (who also co-founded EqualLogic back in the day) was a veteran of multiple Structure conferences, as well as the old podcast that Barb Darrow and I did at Gigaom.

DataGravitys software scours enterprise data stores, identifying potentially sensitive information and analyzing user behavior (e.g., whos accessing it).

Well, DataGravity was apparently struggling and was acquired by HyTrust, which focuses on enterprise compliance and data security, and also announced $36 million in funding on Tuesday. I spoke with HyTrust co-founder and president Eric Chiu, who did a good job explaining the value of DataGravitys technology (which HyTrust intends to keep selling) in terms of recent and future data privacy laws that many countries are enacting. Essentially, he said, companies need to know where user data is being stored so that (a) it doesnt cross borders and (b) they can delete it if required to do so.

The problem isnt just that cloud platforms are often distributed globally and somewhat abstracted, but also that employees will often share data and use data in ways that might open their companies up to risk. So they need to be able to track it down wherever it now resides.Whether or not youre interested in this acquisition, the topic of data privacy should be on everybodys mind right now.

Yes, its an issue that raises lots of thorny ethical questions, but its also an issue that is could have a major influence over the business of buying cloud resources in Europe, China and elsewhere. Artificial intelligenceGoogle finds big data is unreasonably effective in the AI era, this research is focused on a specific application (object recognition) and a specific model type, but that is where a lot of deep learning energy still goes. That said, the big money will be in AI models that learn from less data.

Toyota is investing $100 million in AI and robotics its first official investment is in a startup called Intuition Robotics, which wants to help senior citizens stay in their own homes. Its easy to think about Toyota as just a car maker, but the company has a much broader range of businesses that will benefit from AI. Googles AI VC firm is official: Gradient was first reported back in May, but now Google has officially confirmed it has an engineer-led AI investment arm called Gradient Ventures.

You can check out its first four investment here. Googles new PeopleAI Research effort is exactly what AI needsThe PAIR project hits upon some major issues that need to be solved before any pie-in-the-sky projections about AI canarchitecht.ioCybersecurity startup Darktrace raises $75 pushes the AI-for-cybersecurity marketing pretty hard, but it also has some staunch backers, including the CIO of Las Vegas.

The company is pushing unicorn status, so the pressure is now on to really deliver.Samsung acquires a Greek text-to-speech company is called Innoetics, and TechCrunch is reporting the purchase price was less than $50 million. Samsung appears to be struggling with its digital assistant products, so any tech that can help with that is a positive.

Everyone loves traffic jam autopilot in Audis new carspectrum.ieee.orgThis really cool (it will full-on drive for you at less than 60 mph), kinda creepy (especially the driver-monitoring camera part) and the kind of baby steps we need before going fully autonomous.

OpenText delivers a Watson competitor in text information management is not the worlds most exciting space, but its relatively important. Really, when we talk about how AI will remake the economy, that will largely be by remaking lots of mundane tasks. Cloud and infrastructureLinkerd creator Buoyant raises $10.

5 million for its service mesh might not have heard of Buoyant, but its linkerd technology is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its founders have lots of microservices experience at Twitter and elsewhere. DigitalOcean is offering high-CPU instances based on new Intel referenced this up top, but wanted to highlight it here, as well. Watching DigitalOcean mature is interesting, especially in a cloud ecosystem dominated by huge companies.

Check out CTO Julia Austin on the podcast back in March.Backblaze found that hard drive prices have flattened race to zero apparently stops, or seriously slows down, at about 3 cents per gigabyte. Netflix details its serveless-like is a good read for application developers and architects looking for a way to make the process that much more agile.

Its also a good reminder that serverless doesnt have to mean Amazon Lambda or another managed service. And heres how the Financial Times does uses Lambda, and complements it with a bunch of other AWS services. You gotta pick your battles and, sometimes, your cloud providers.

All things dataDatatron raises $2. 7 million for natural-language data feel like weve seen this before including from Salesforce with mixed results. But analytics still isnt a solved problem, so why not try it again?

Data governance: Still important but changing fastsvds. comThis is good advice from the folks at Silicon Valley Data Science, but it seems many companies are still far away from any sort of workable cross-company data plan.Uber explains how its analytics system is based around Presto and HDFS, with appearances by Flink, MemSQL, MySQL, Postgres, Kafka and more.

My question is when well start seeing the next-big-thing companies that run next-gen, smaller data systems and what those will be.SAP rolls out an IoT software suite called the one hand, this seems pretty smart because IoT is, well, IoT. On the other hand, theres a lot of coopetition happening between SAP and its cloud partners, who also are trying to own IoT data management