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from the still-has-to-get-from-here-to-there dept.
New specifications from two new consortia will bring data unprecedented boosts in data transfer speeds to computers as early as next year. OpenCAPI Consortium's connector specification will bring significant bandwidth improvements inside computers. OpenCAPI, announced Friday, will link storage, memory, GPUs, and CPUs, much like PCI-Express 3.0, but will be 10 times faster with data speeds of 150GBps (gigabytes per second). Memory, storage, and GPUs will keep getting faster, and OpenCAPI will keep computers ready for those technologies, Brad McCredie, an IBM fellow, said in an interview.
[...] AMD, a member of OpenCAPI Consortium, is making its Radeon GPUs compatible with OpenCAPI ports on Power9 servers. But don't expect OpenCAPI immediately in mainstream PCs or servers, most of which run on x86 chips from Intel and AMD. AMD, for now, isn't targeting OpenCAPI at desktops and won't be putting the ports in x86 servers, a spokesman said.
[...] A second consortium, called Gen-Z, announced a new protocol focused on increasing data transfer speeds mostly between computers, but also inside of them when needed. The protocol, announced earlier this week, will initially be targeted at servers but could bring fundamental changes to the way computers are built. The consortium boasts big names including Samsung, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AMD, ARM, and Micron. Right now, computers come with memory, storage, and processors in one box. But the specification from Gen-Z—which is focused heavily on memory and storage—could potentially decouple all of those units into separate boxes, establishing a peer-to-peer connection between all of them.
Gen-Z is also focused on making it easier to add new types of nonvolatile memory like 3D Xpoint, which can be used as memory, storage or both. Many new types of memory technologies under research are also seen as DRAM and SSD replacements. [...] To achieve that real-time goal, Gen-Z has developed a high-performance fabric that "provides a peer to peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks," according to the consortium. The data transfer rate can scale to 112GT/s (gigatransfers per second) between servers. For comparison, the upcoming PCI-Express 4.0 will have a transfer rate of 16 GT/s per lane inside computers, and data transfers in computers are usually faster.
AnandTech article, OpenCAPI website, and OpenCAPI press release. Gen-Z Consortium website (intended to be confused with other uses of "Gen-Z"?).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @12:28PM
Coherent memory buses have been around practically forever. We just keep tweaking the specifics to move the bottlenecks around.