Global tech majors join to take on Intel with open data centre
14 Oct 2016
A consortium of technology leaders, including AMD, Dell EMC, Google, HPE, IBM, Mellanox, Micron, Nvidia, and Xilinx on Thursday announced the launch of a non-profit OpenCAPI Consortium, a new industry group that will promote new specification that can boost datacenter server performance by up to ten times, to take on Intel Corp, the world's largest chipmaker.
The new standard, called Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI), is an open forum to provide a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification.
The group says that gear complying with the specs - which also use the name OpenCAPI - will achieve up to 10 times faster performance and that this sort of hardware will become available in the second half of 2017.
The open interface will help corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics and other emerging workloads.
The consortium plans to make the OpenCAPI specification available to the public before the end of the year and expects servers and related products based on the new standard in the second half of 2017, it said in a statement.
Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is known to protect its server technologies and has chosen to sit out of the new consortium. In the past also, it had stayed away from prominent open standards technology groups such as CCIX and Gen-Z.
The server specification, which will become available before the end of this year, calls for the chip to be physically closer to the storage media. OpenCAPI-based servers, the organisation says, can transfer 25 gigabits of data per second, while the current PCIe specification can transfer 16 gigabits per second.
Companies will be able to build products that meet the specs by joining the consortium or by getting a license from the group. There will be IBM POWER9-based servers, ''Zaius'' servers from Google and Rackspace, and Xilinx field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that meet the specs, according to a statement. CAPI stands for the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) in POWER8-based servers.
The launch is reminiscent of the Open Compute Project that Facebook introduced in 2012 to share and collaborate on designs for its data center infrastructure. That venture has produced collaborations on the compute, storage, and networking levels.
The OpenCAPI work builds on IBM's efforts to unite other vendors around its POWER chip architecture through the OpenPOWER Foundation. Google, IBM, Mellanox, and Nvidia, among others, were on board for the establishment of the OpenPOWER Consortium in 2013.
The organization's board includes one director from each of the founding companies. The board takes input from a technical steering committee, whose members are elected representatives from companies that are members of the organization.
