AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Qualcomm, and Xilinx announce CCIX

[csbin]

http://www.ccixconsortium.com/

Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX)

Open Acceleration Framework for Data Centers and Other Markets

Accelerating applications in the data center has become a requirement due to power and space constraints. Applications such as big data analytics, search, machine learning, NFV, wireless 4G/5G, in-memory database processing, video analytics, and network processing, benefit from acceleration engines that need to move data seamlessly among the various system components.

Connecting Processor Architecture and Accelerators Seamlessly

CCIX will allow components to access and process data irrespective of where it resides, without the need for complex programming environments. This ability to access data coherently dramatically improves performance and usability by enabling a driver-less and interrupt-less usage model. Additional capabilities include:

• Both off-load and bump-in-the-wire inline application acceleration while leveraging existing server ecosystems and form factors thereby improving total cost of ownership (TCO)
  
• Higher bandwidth compared to the existing interface
  
• Orders of magnitude improvement in application latency
  
• Seamless processor and accelerator hardware cache coherency support
  

Widespread Collaboration among Industry Technology Leaders

For the first time in the industry, a single interconnect technology specification will ensure that processors using different instruction set architectures (ISA) can coherently share data with accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs, Smart Interconnects and enable efficient heterogeneous computing - significantly improving compute efficiency for servers running data center workloads. Advanced Micro Devices, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Qualcomm, and Xilinx have joined forces to bring this high-performance open acceleration framework to the industry.

http://www.ccixconsortium.com/notify.html

 

[VirtualLarry]

I thought that's what AMD's HyperTransport (LDT, Lightning Data Transport) was for.

Is CCIX based on HT, or something new?

Edit: Is this just for usage internal to SoCs, or is it a viable off-die bus (like I2C, etc.)? Is it possible we'll see CCIX slots on boards, rather than just PCI-E?

 

[Denithor]

Notably absent, Intel. Doesn't play nice with others?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Notably absent, Intel. Doesn't play nice with others?

They already have their technology.

 

[myocardia]

Notably absent, Intel. Doesn't play nice with others?

If any of the companies that formed this consortium had anywhere near half the server sales & profits that Intel has, they wouldn't have joined, either.

edit: These companies created this consortium to be able to pool their resources, in an attempt to give Intel some competition in the server arena. I say good for them. While it isn't extremely likely to work, any competition that they can give to Intel at all will benefit pretty much every company in existence, besides Intel, of course.

 

[dark zero]

INBF nVIDIA, Apple, Samsung, Mediatek, Imagination and VIA will join them.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Notably absent, Intel. Doesn't play nice with others?

Apple is missing as well.

 

[jhu]

INBF nVIDIA, Apple, Samsung, Mediatek, Imagination and VIA will join them.

Also absent: Dell, HP, Oracle, Lenovo

 

[Soulkeeper]

A competitor to NVLink ?

 

[csbin]

A competitor to NVLink ?

No

Seamless processor and accelerator hardware cache coherency support

 

[Ajay]

Also absent: Dell, HP, Oracle, Lenovo

Well, no Intel so no surprise there.

 

[imported_ats]

Damn that's about as information free of an announcement that I've ever seen. There literally isn't anything useful there. You would think they would say how its different better than PCIe, CAPI, NVLINK, RapidIO, QPI, IB, etc. But nope, just purely information free. At the minimum RapidIO already provides anything they are implying, is available, and is an open industry consortium standard.

 

[prtskg]

Notably absent, Intel. Doesn't play nice with others?

Since this consortium was started to compete against Intel, I doubt absence of intel is anything to be noted.
NVLink was made to work with Power8 and this could cause friction between IBM and Nvidia.

 

[dark zero]

Also absent: Dell, HP, Oracle, Lenovo

Dell is Intel exclusive. HP is an interesting case.

Oracle has SPARC
Lenovo maybe is with IBM.

 

[monstercameron]

Dell is Intel exclusive. HP is an interesting case.

Oracle has SPARC
Lenovo maybe is with IBM.

Look into hp again and at project moonshot. Also dell has been touing with the idea of arm servers...
That is to say, these hoes aint loyal...to intel only the almighty dolla.

 

[Redentor]

Dell is no more a limited company, so Dell can use any CPU vendor.

 

[coffeemonster]

Look into hp again and at project moonshot. Also dell has been touing with the idea of arm servers...
That is to say, these hoes aint loyal...to intel only the almighty dolla.

Interesting.
http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-6076ENW
Look on page 4
one of the SoCs they offer is a AMD Opteron X2150 APU @1.5 GHz (K10 cores with HD8000 igpu) Looks like a modified 7 year old Istanbul