 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 17. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE, special two-day coverage here in Palo Alto. We have reporters, we have analysts on the ground in San Francisco analyzing what's going on with Google Next. We have all the great action. Of course, we also have reporters at Open Compute Summit, which is also happening in San Jose, and Intel's at both places. We have Intel Senior Manager on the line here on the phone. Lisa Spellman, Vice President and General Manager of Xeon Product Line, product management responsibility as well as marketing across the data center. Lisa, welcome to theCUBE coverage, and thanks for calling in and dissecting Google Next, as well as teasing up maybe a little bit of OCP around the Xeon processor. Thanks for calling. Well, thank you for having us. It's a busy week and we're all over, so we'll do this on the phone, and next time we'll do it in person. Love to. Well, more big news is obviously, Intel has a big presence with the Google Next, and tomorrow there's going to be some activity with some of the big name executives at Google talking about your relationship with Google, aka Alphabet. What are some of the key things that you guys are doing with Google that people should know about? Because this is a very turbulent time in the ecosystem of the tech business. You saw Mobile World Congress last week. We've seen the evolution of 5G. We have network transformation going on. Data centers are moving to a hybrid cloud. In some cases, cloud native is exploding, so all new kind of computing environment is taking shape. What is Intel doing here at Google Next? That's a proof point to the trajectory of the business. Yeah, I like to think it's not too much of a surprise that Google given all of the work that we've done together over the last several years in the tight engineering and technical partnership that we have. One of the big things that we've been working with Google on is as they move from delivering cloud services for their own usage and for their own applications that they provide out to others, but now as they transition into being a cloud service provider for enterprises and other IT shops as well. So they've recently formed, they just in the last week or so did a nice announcement about the partnership that we have together and how the Google Cloud Platform is now in the market and available for customers. And we very much value the one we have with Google where we have that need to provide. So you don't just look at it as a one-off project or a one-time investment, it's an ongoing continuation and evolution of new products, new features, new capabilities to continue to improve their total cost of... Well, Lisa, this is your baby, the Xeon, codename Skylake, which love that name. Intel always has great codenames, by the way. We love that, but it's real technology. Can you share some specific features of what's different around these new workloads? Because we've been teasing out over the past day and we're going to be talking tomorrow as well about these new use cases, because you're looking at a plethora of use cases from IoT Edge all the way down into cloud-native applications. What specific things is Xeon doing that's next generation that you could highlight that points to this new cloud operating system, the cloud service providers, whether it's managed services to full-blown, down-and-dirty cloud? So, Atong, but really it's very specific workload acceleration for things like high-performance computing workloads. And high-performance computing is something that we see mirroring of that workload specifically driving benefit from the new platforms and seeing really strong performance improvements. You can use these installed workloads that can move to the most optimized hardware for whatever you're trying to drive. Some of the other things that we've talked about and announced is we'll have our next generation of Intel Resource Director Technology, which really helps you manage and provide quality of service within your applications, which is very important to cloud service providers, giving them control over parts so that they can deliver the best yet for. And then the other one is Intel Omnipath architecture. So again, some capability of the product line will continue to roll out in the middle of this year, but we're excited to be able to offer an early version to then do that full-scale enterprise validation over the next several months. So I got to ask you the question because this is something that's coming up. We're seeing a transition. Obviously the digital transformation has been talked about for a while. Network transformation, IOTs all around the corner. We got autonomous vehicles, smart cities, on and on. But I got to ask you though, the cloud service providers seems to be coming out of this show as a key storyline in Google Next as the multi-cloud architecture has become very clear. So it's become clear. It's not just this show, but it's been building up to this. It's pretty clear that it's going to be a multi-cloud world. As well as you're starting to see the providers talk about their SaaS offerings, Google talking about G Suite, Microsoft talks about Office 365, Oracle has their apps, IBM's got Watson. So you have the SaaSification. So this now creates a whole nother category of what cloud is. If you include SaaS, you're really talking about Salesforce, Adobe. On and on the list, everyone is potentially going to become a SaaS provider, whether they're unique cloud or partnering with some of the cloud. What does that mean from a cloud service provider? What do they need for application support requirements to be successful? So Intel, we are talking about if it's a lot of the airtime or focus, but SaaS is actually the bigger business. And that's why you see people moving towards it, especially as Enterprise IT becomes more uncomfortable with using SaaS applications. Maybe first they started with uploading their expense report tool, but over time they've moved into more sophisticated offerings that free up resources for them to view their most critical or business critical applications that they require to stay in more of a private cloud. Multi-cloud and hybrid tree, whether you are an enterprise or whether you're a cloud service provider. And then the musical because people are demanding just more and more services, working so close to multi-generations that we deliver on those demanding workloads. The other thing that we see the providers focusing on is what's their differentiation. So that we'll look through whatever their key workload is or whatever their key market is, the silicon features so that they can have a differentiated offering into the market about what capabilities and services they'll provide. So it's an area where we continue to really focus our efforts is drive the TCO down to the point of what's going to. It's interesting the definitions also are probably I would agree with you the cloud service provider is a huge market when you look at the SaaS because whether you're talking about Uber or Netflix for instance, examples people will know about in real life. You can't ignore these new diverse use cases coming out. Like for instance, I was just talking with Stu Miniman, one of our analysts here at Wikibon and Riot Games could be considered a cloud, right? I mean, because it's a SaaS platform, it's gaming. So you start to see these new apps coming out of the woodwork. There seems to be a requirement for being agile as a cloud provider. How do you enable that? I mean, what specifically can you share if I'm a cloud service provider to be ready to support anything that's coming down the pike? Stick with the near term, how much we've expanded and we have there, but we've gone a lot of variety. So again, I mentioned Xeon 5. Xeon 5, a typical Xeon, but specific workload acceleration targeted a high performance computing and other analytics workloads. And then you have things at the other end, you've got Z on D, which is really focused at more front end network workloads, lower power and more focused on cold and warm storage workloads. And again, that, hey, we're not just sticking there for everything, we're thinking into a lot of other silicon innovation. So I don't know if you guys have had PGA group and driving and delivering cloud and network acceleration through FPGAs. We've also introduced new products in the last year, like Silicon Photon across and through. So FPGA, that's the Alchera stuff, we did talk with them, they're doing the programmable chips. You need the workload to accelerate, but once you have it, it is a very powerful performance gain for you. So the cloud service providers are a perfect market for that as are the con service providers because they have very sophisticated, again, go back to the workload, understand what they need and added all these different things, different new products to the cloud together with Intel CPUs and Intel Ethernet and Intel FPGA and Intel Silicon Photonics, you can start to see how the whole package, when it's designed together under one house, can offer a tremendous amount of workload acceleration. I got to ask you a question, Lisa, because this just comes out, but as you're talking, I'm just in my mind visualizing a new kind of virtual computer server. The world is, the cloud is one big server. So it's a design challenge. And what was teased out of Mobile World Congress, I was very clear was this new end to end architecture, you know, reimagined, but if you have these processors that have unique capabilities that have use case specific capabilities, in a way you guys are now providing a portfolio of solutions so that it almost can be customized for a variety of cloud service providers. Am I getting that right? Is that how you guys see this happening where you guys can go to someone and say, hey, just mix and match what you want and you're good? Well, and we try to provide a little bit of people who have their options to choose, but like with the work of one cloud service provider another one that is a company called Nervon, if you're going to be using your business, then you're going to want to use something like the silicon that we acquired. You'll want to use something like Xeon with late Crest to get that for frameworks and the libraries and all of that that actually give you something that can. On the competitive side, we've seen the processor landscape heat up on the server and the cloud space. Obviously, whether it's from a competitor or homegrown, foundry, whatever, you know, fabs are out there. I mean, so Intel's always had a great partnership with cloud service providers. Vis-a-vis the competition in context to that, what are you guys doing specifically and how you'd approach the marketplace in light of competition? So let's take all competitor story, but when you look at new products and new generations in market since the last major competitive X86, we give our customers the choice to optimize for their workloads. So you can go up to 72 cores with Xeon 5. That's important. You can go with those two cores with Adam. If that's what works for you. So it's just an example of how we try to kind of address all of our customer segments with the right product at the right time. And IoT certainly brings a challenge too when you talk about network edge. That's a huge, huge growth area. I mean, you can't deny that. That's gonna be amazing. You look at a car as a data center these days, right? So, I mean. A data center on wheels. Data center on wheels. So that's been one of the fun things about, you know, my role even in the last year is that growing partnership, even inside of Intel with our IoT team. The other thing is like, if you look it in the data center space, I haven't worked with to optimize their architecture and get that workload acceleration. And now we have the chance to put that same playbook into play in the IoT space. So it's a, being a ton of standards to still be building kits to be put together. You know, we don't just throw something out to the market and say, good luck. We actually put the ecosystem together around it so that it performs. And I think that's kind of what you see with, I don't know if you guys saw our Intel Go and that whole like product offering for what you need for truly delivering automated vehicles. Well, Lisa, I got to say, it's a, you guys are, you know, have great formula. Why fix what's not broken? Stay with Moore's law. Keep that cadence going. But what's interesting is you are listening and adapting to the architectural shifts, which is smart. So congratulations. And I think, you know, as the cloud service provider world changes, certainly in the data center, it's going to be a turbulent time but a lot of opportunity. And so good to have that reliability. And if you can make the software go faster, then they can write more software faster. So. And that's what we've seen. Every time we deliver a step function, improvement in performance, we see a step function improvement in demand. And so the world is still hungry for more and more compute. And we see this across all of our customer bases, you're more affordable. They come up with new innovative different ways to do things, to get things done and new services to off drives us. Is that desire to continue to be the backbone of that industry innovation? If you could sum up the bumper sticker what that step function is, what is that new step function? Oh, when we say step functions of improvements, I mean, we're always looking at targeting, you know, over 20% performance improvement per generation. And then on top of that, other capabilities beyond it. So it might not, and then you're also getting a new capabilities like security features added on top. So you'll see more and more of those types of announcements from us as well. Where we kind of highlight that you can continue to address, you know, again, the only needs that are out there. So we're all trying to say, stay a step ahead. All right, Lisa Spellman, VP of the GM of the Xeon product family as well as marketing and data center. Thank you for spending the time and sharing your insights on Google Next and giving us a peek at the portfolio of the Xeon next generation. Really appreciate it. And again, keep on bringing that power to Moore's Law. More flexibility. Thank you so much for sharing. We wrap up more live coverage here in Palo Alto after the short break.