TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante interviewed Dylan Larson, Director of Xeon Platform Marketing at Intel, during our live broadcast at IBM Edge 2013 this week in Las Vegas, asking him about the company’s key message at this event.

Larson happily obliged, explaining how Intel has been busy refreshing their product lines, while working closely with IBM and bringing great products to the market. For Larson personally, the best thing that happened was his involvement with the division that will drive the next generation of server platforms.

Apart from its trademark, Intel has bitten a large chunk of the storage market, which is no surprise since storage has begun to look a lot like the processor. Metadata and Flash are already morphing, along with all the other services available on the market.

Making the case for smarter cores

The storage platforms are only going to do more and more computations. It’s no longer placing data on disk; it’s all about analytics, and doing much deeper and more efficient provisioning of the capabilities. It’s putting the CPU to work in ways that haven’t been seen before.

In that respect, analytics coming to the storage platforms represents good news for Intel. If six months ago Cloud was present in virtually any presentation, today we have Analytics, Hadoop and other technologies that are basically putting data to work.

Processors still double in performance every 18 months, so Larson dismisses the rumor that Intel days are numbered. He admits that pushing the shrinkage of transistors and other parts can face one day the limits of the physical world, but he insists that day is not here yet.

Apple + more in Intel’s pipeline

Moving on, Larson refused to talk about unreleased products, but engaged in a chat with Furrier regarding the rumor of a 12 core processor Mac Pro. Apparently the information was released by Apple, not by Intel, so, the big smile on Larson’s face was confirmation enough.

What has changed in the past couple of years was the ability to pack more and more transistors in the same area, following the Moore’s law, basically packing more and more capabilities in smaller and smaller spaces. The extra space can be used for specialized acceleration, cryptography, and it enables the real-time analytics.

What surprises Larson the most in the current tech world is the ability to put that much info to work. Indexing the entire internet, building correlation between what’s happening over the internet (machine learning), augmented reality. There’s no doubt that they will at some point morph together. But the mind-blowing factor in Larson’s opinion is the sheer scale. We’re talking millions and millions of people with billions and billions of devices, all interacting, creating data with every move they make. Keeping up with this level-scale demand both puzzles and excites Larson.

Because cost-efficiency is a hot topic, Larson explained how is Intel tackling the issue of cutting costs in data centres. Intel is looking at cores as a way to drive more and more performance capabilities. They are trying to do that without ramping frequency, because that generates more heat. The solution they are working on is increasing the dynamic range. The power is scaled down when there is no working requested and scaled back up when it’s needed. This performance on demand is able to drive down the power consumption of all these devices.