Intel Teams with Snowflake

Intel welcomes Snowflake to the Intel® Disruptor Initiative Program. Working together, Intel and Snowflake provide customers with performance and increased flexibility across multiple public clouds with Snowflake’s Data Cloud using Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel Xeon-based cloud instances.

Snowflake’s Data Cloud runs on multiple cloud infrastructures, delivering virtually unlimited scale and concurrency. The high-performing Intel instances are the common denominator across cloud service provider availability zones in multiple public clouds and, as a result, present the platform for Snowflake to build a flexible cloud solution for its customers.

“Collaborating together, Intel and Snowflake provide optimal performance to our joint customers. For us, that’s the goal. Whatever we can do to improve our price-performance will benefit our end customers, and it’s great to collaborate with Intel to accomplish just that,” said Justin Fitzhugh, vice president of Cloud Engineering at Snowflake.

Motivated to innovate new cloud platforms, Intel and Snowflake are starting with performance testing across clouds and hardware instances to better match up the best performing Intel-based instances for specific Snowflake workloads. Insights will allow Snowflake to optimize instances with multiple cloud providers in the near term. Over time, this helps Intel design and produce chips that offer processor features that benefit specific workloads.

Working together, Intel’s team is looking broadly across Snowflake’s product capabilities that benefit mutual customers. As part of testing and proof-of-concept efforts, Intel teams are delivering improvements to Snowflake’s search engine optimization when used to search semi-structured data like JSON. Moreover, Intel has delivered improvements in the balance between data ingestion and query performance; for example, Intel reduced certain query times from 7 minutes to 10 seconds¹  .

Arijit Bandyopadhyay, chief technology officer in the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel, said that unlocking Intel architecture value with the latest products and platform innovations through software optimization and ecosystem enablement is valuable and benefits Intel’s mutual enterprise customers.

“When those we collaborate with grow, Intel grows,” Bandyopadhyay said. “Intel’s engineering teams help disruptor innovators exploit the latest Intel products together with leading software optimizations and silicon engineering to optimize critical workloads across deployment models. Together with teams like Snowflake engineering, we can reach new heights in SQL query acceleration while innovating on the next-generation hyperscaler instance designs across major cloud providers.”

Ramesh Arakere, director of Intel’s Enterprise Software Ecosystem Engineering team, said: “Intel has a long history of innovation and deep collaboration with leading software companies. Continuing with that tradition, the addition of Snowflake to the Intel Disruptor Program will help accelerate the pace of innovation in the data analytics ecosystem.”

This announcement builds on Intel’s software-first strategy, which is focused on openness, choice and trust. By teaming broadly with independent software vendors to optimize software everywhere, Intel aims to be the silicon platform of choice for applications running from edge to cloud. With this announcement, Intel is also optimizing and enabling open-source technologies used in Snowflake’s software stack, such as Foundation DB, to accelerate workloads optimized for Intel’s processors, enabling customer use cases with performance advantages.

For information about the Snowflake and Intel collaboration, read a LinkedIn post from Snowflake’s Colleen Kapase and the replay of the companies’ joint session at Intel Innovation 2021.