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posted by on Saturday May 27 2017, @07:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the another-reason-for-new-hardware dept.

IBM gave the audience a deeper dive into the OpenCAPI initiative and hardware at the recently concluded HPC Advisory Council annual meeting in Lugano, Switzerland.

OpenCAPI is a new connection type that gives a high bandwidth, low latency, connection for memory, accelerators, network, storage, and other devices like ASICs.

One of the design goals for CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) was to minimise latency – shooting for "equivalent effective latency of DDR standards". They've done a good job of reaching that goal, with very low 10 nanosecond latency for devices like accelerators and even achieving 5ns latency for advanced memory.

The latency numbers are a pretty big deal – POWER8 round trip latency is about 10ns, and that's very sporty for a processor. Even more important is that the 10ns latency of OpenCAPI beats PCIe like a drum, since a typical PCIe round trip incurs a 100ns latency penalty.

When it comes to bandwidth, OpenCAPI today offers 25GBps while PCIe gen 3 currently offers 32GBps. The speaker, IBM's Jeff Stuecheli, explained that succeeding instances of OpenCAPI will run at 32GBps then 56GBps and higher.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:13AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:13AM (#516341)

    OpenUNIX?

    Or Like 'Open Patents and Copyrights not under FRAND licensing terms. Wholly royalty free?'

    If it is fully open, awesome. Doubly so if it can be implemented in a slower version for open source FPGA implementation. If it is not, then yay, lower latency, but it won't be replacing PCIe or any of those other standards at less than the enterprise/embedded level.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:21AM (#516348)

    Open in what sense?

    You are open to license this new technology. Just contact IBM and have your financial statements from the last 10 years handy.