Chips-as-a-Service on Startup's Menu

Accelerators need a better channel, entrepreneur says

By Rick Merritt, EETimes
March 14, 2019

SAN JOSE, Calif. — High-end processors and accelerators need to be sold as a service, said the head of a startup who wants to do it. He also described work on a class of small data centers emerging on the edge of the Internet and specs from the Open19 Foundation.

The good news is “it’s a golden age of silicon again…we see a lot of hardware innovation happening,” said Zac Smith, founder and chief executive of Packet, a startup that provides cloud services running at its own data centers.

The bad news is “enterprises don’t want to buy hardware. They don’t even want to rack-and-stack Intel CPUs, let alone something they haven’t tried,” said Smith whose first startup, Voxel, helped pioneer the infrastructure-as-a-service business at the same time as Amazon’s AWS.

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