Intel GM Jeremy Rader On Sapphire Rapids ‘Innovations,’ The Granulate Acquisition And ‘Delivering To The Workload’

Jeremy Rader, who leads Intel’s data platforms group, said the chip giant is determined to leverage its full product portfolio to drive enterprise computing workload leadership in areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, analytics and hyperconverged infrastructure.

“We are always delivering to the workload,” said Rader. “And if the workload calls for a different technology, we have this portfolio that allows us to say, ‘That’s a great CPU opportunity,’ or, ‘This really could benefit from what we’re doing in FPGA or in other technologies.’ It allows you to get [away from] this force-fitting of everything under one technology umbrella.”

Rader, whose Intel career spans more than two decades, said the company is making investments in FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), GPUs and XPUs to drive workload leadership and is backing that up with partnerships with a broad array of OEMs and software partners.

“We’ll continue to innovate, continue to execute ... and it’s going to come down to every socket, every workload we’re going after,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got this big ecosystem of software vendors, of OEMs, and others that we’re collaborating with to make sure that those technologies are reaching the end consumer the way we need them to.”

Rader’s global team of more than 100 employees is tasked with developing enterprise business strategies, defining target market segments, and developing partnerships. His team’s mission is to engineer innovative, thought-leading solutions by closely partnering with software and hardware companies to deliver customer and ecosystem value while growing Intel’s data-centric business.

In an interview with CRN, Rader discusses Intel’s CPU sales strategy, how the recent acquisition of Israeli cloud services startup Granulate will help Intel optimize cloud tools, and what sets Intel apart from rivals.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.