Intel Developer Cloud Launches For Pre-Launch Software Development/Testing

Intel at their Innovation event this week in California is talking up the new Intel Developer Cloud. The Intel Developer Cloud aims to make it easier for customers/partners/developers to test new and future hardware platforms.

The Intel Developer Cloud will host new and future Intel hardware platforms to aide with pre-launch development and testing. The Intel Developer Cloud is rolling out immediately with access to Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server platforms as well as Intel Data Center GPUs.

This is a good move assuming broad enough availability among developers, particularly on the Linux / open-source side will be interesting.

Over on the AMD side, last year AMD launched the Accelerator Cloud for testing EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators and making it easier to evaluate their ROCm compute stack. The AMD Accelerator Cloud is similar to the Intel Developer Cloud but on the AMD side is all about new but expensive hardware while Intel's Developer Cloud will appear to be for more pre-launch testing.

Among the Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors to be available in the Intel Developer Cloud are the SKUs with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Xeon D "Ice Lake D" Processors will be available in this cloud along with the Habana Gaudi2 deep learning accelerators.

More details on the Intel Developer Cloud should be published soon at Intel.com and opening up the cloud shortly as a limited beta trial.