The record revenue Intel reported for 2014 was driven largely by its emphasis on high-powered datacenter products and there is such growth in demand for custom processors that, by the end of 2015, half the Xeon chips Intel sells to Cloud providers could be custom designs.

The record revenue Intel reported for 2014 was driven largely by its emphasis on high-powered datacenter products and there is such growth in demand for custom processors that, by the end of 2015, half the Xeon chips Intel sells to Cloud providers could be custom designs.

Intel has always been willing to modify its high-end server chips for big datacenter customers, adding memory, cutting power requirements or making other modifications to fit the specifications of just a few customers with specialized requirements.

Cloud computing has now created a larger market driven by the requirements of Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others that even a tiny change to optimize one feature of a chip like the high-end Xeon E7-2600 can make a huge difference, when multiplied by millions of high-density servers that are also custom-designed to run the specific workloads most common in that datacenter as efficiently as possible.

Companies like AWS “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people – you want to optimize everything,” according to Diane Bryant, head of Intel’s Data Center Group, in a Dec. 19 story in the New York Times. “The name of the game is customization.”