IBM’s new OpenCAPI mechanism read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1334-ibm-s-new-opencapi-mechanism

Imagine the business challenges that would be solved with 10 times faster data center server performance. For those of you IBM releases a new OpenCAPI mechanism. CAPI stands for Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface, and in its new form a new layer on motherboards.

It doesn’t replace QPI or Hyper Transport, it works as a very fast (3x faster than PCIe Gen 3) connection between CPUs and other peripherals like GPUs, FPGAs, fast memory, coherent network controllers, or coherent storage controllers.

In this case, the components attached to CAPI are operating within the same address space as applications and thus can have the same access to data as the main CPU.

IMAGE SOURCE:[IBM]

PCIe has been the technology of choice to connect these new things because it was the only choice. Think of PCIe as an old freeway. In this freeway analogy, PCIe has 16 independent single lanes where cars travel either way. 

By contrast, CAPI is a very wide superhighway built adjacent to the old PCIe interstate, with much higher speed limits (3x), way fewer toll booths (latency caused by interfaces), and adds coherency, which means that each car knows exactly where it’s going and how to get there.

It is the increased speed of the wires, plus the radical reduction of interfaces to negotiate, which gives the potential form 10x speed-up.

 

One of the reasons that this is such a big deal is Tech leaders, including AMD, Dell, EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, NVIDIA and other joining forces with the goal to build servers that meet the higher performance requirements of data, analytics, AI and other emerging workloads because of the new organization IBM announced OpenCAPI.