"Intel has always been very interested in trying to increase the size of the market it serves," Brookwood said. "A lot of chip suppliers just look at chips and say, 'We'll make the chip and someone else will figure out how to use it.' Intel has always taken an expansive view ... and tries to make sure that there are places for all the chips they can produce."

The Cloud Builders program is one example of how Intel does this.

"We have customers who want to do something in the cloud but they want a 'how-to' guy," said Jason Waxman, general manager of high density computing at Intel. "That's what we're trying to do with Cloud Builders."

Working with partners, Intel so far has developed 25 reference architectures and expects to have another 25 by the end of the year. They fall into two broad categories: building the cloud and "enhancing" the cloud. Each is supported by a white paper that describes how to set up the required hardware and software.

One reference architecture Intel showed off this week lets data center managers move workloads around based on the power consumption of individual servers. The example used Dell servers, VMware's vCenter management software and a software plug-in developed by Intel.