| | | OpenCAPI Unveiled: AMD, IBM, Google, Xilinx, Micron and Mellanox Join Forces in the Heterogenous Computing
Johan De Gelas on October 14, 2016 8:00 AM EST
(Excerpt):
Big Data thus needs big brains: we need more processing power than ever. As Moore's law is dead (the end of CMOS scaling), we can not expect much from process technology advancements. The processing power has to come from ASICs ( see Google's TPU), FPGAs (see Microsoft's project Catapult) and GPUs.
Those accelerators need a new "Torrenza technology", a fast, coherent interconnect to the CPU. NVIDIA was first with NVLink, but an open standard would be even better. IBM on the other hand was willing to share the CAPI interface.
To that end, Google, AMD, Xilinx, Micron and Mellanox have joined forces with IBM to create a "coherent high performance bus interface" based on a new bus standard called "Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface" (OpenCAPI). Capable of a 25Gbits per second per lane data rate, OpenCAPI outperforms the current PCIe specification, which offers a maximum data transfer rate of 16Gbits per second for a PCIe 3.0 lane. We assume that the total bandwidth will be a lot higher for quite a few OpenCAPI devices, as OpenCAPI lanes will be bundled together.
It is a win, win for everybody besides Intel. It is clear now that IBM's OpenPOWER initiative is gaining a lot of traction and that IBM is deadly serious about offering an alternative to the Intel dominated datacenter. IBM will implement the OpenCAPI interface in the POWER9 servers in 2017. Those POWER9s will not only have a very fast interface to NVIDIA GPUs (via NVLink), but also to Google's ASICs and Xilinx FPGAs accelerators.
Meanwhile this benefits AMD as they get access to an NVLink alternative to link up the Radeon GPU power to the upcoming Zen based server processors. Micron can link faster (and more profitable than DRAM) memory to the CPU. Mellanox can do the same for networking. OpenCAPI is even more important for the Xilinx FPGAs as a coherent interface can make FPGAs attractive for a much wider range of applications than today.
And guess what, Dell/EMC has joined this new alliance just a few days ago. Intel has to come up with an answer...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10759/opencapi-unveiled-amd-ibm-google-more
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