Google, IBM, Dell EMC: We can make servers that are 10 times faster

Some of the world's largest technology firms have announced a specification for a technology aimed at boosting server performance by up to 10 times. The #OpenCAPI specification outlines the architecture for a new interface that would allow server CPUs to swap data with hardware accelerators, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays ( #FPGAs ) -- as well as memory, network and storage -- more rapidly than is possible today. OpenCAPI has been released by a consortium led by #AMD, #Dell #EMC, #Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE ), #IBM, #Mellanox Technologies, #Micron, #NVIDIA and #Xilinx. The consortium claim OpenCAPI (Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) will be necessary if the performance of computers is to continue to grow at the pace it has in the past. As the rate at which faster processors are developed slows, they say computers will rely more heavily on hardware accelerators and advanced memory technologies -- such as #phasechangememory -- to deliver performance boosts. To this end, computers will be able to use OpenCAPI interfaces to connect CPUs to hardware accelerators at 25Gbps, faster than the maximum 16Gbps offered by the existing PCI Express interfaces, removing some of the bottlenecks in today's computing architectures. That performance boost will be deliver a variety of benefits, the consortium says, for example giving FPGA and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) the ability to behave as if they were integrated into the CPU, thanks to OpenCAPI's performance, virtual addressing and coherence capabilities. The interface's coherent network and storage controllers will also reduce software overheads, improving the speed of data access.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ibm-dell-emc-we-can-make-servers-that-are-10-times-faster/