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Hopefully this effort will get us rid of PCIe for good, unlike the version of CAPI available on POWER8.
I've been guilty of using too many quotes in the recent past. Someone on HN called me on it, and I've since toned it down. Now it's something that sticks out at me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have every big name in this, including an x86 vendor. We don't need Intel. That's not a statement I can make often. :)
Intel has 99% of the server market.
I note that Facebook and Intel are missing, which makes me wonder if they are off in a corner somewhere doing their own thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have every big name in this, including an x86 vendor. We don't need Intel. That's not a statement I can make often. :)
Intel has 99% of the server market.
In the end, that's also what is at stake, and the reason Intel might not be that interested. They will maybe see the light and see that they would have to steer the collaboration toward a more beneficial direction (for them), but at first, they will probably wait for it to gain momentum before deciding that they have to invest money to push the effort in the right direction (for them).
They have to be a threat for the established company to make a move. What nickpsecurity is saying by telling that they don't need Intel is that they are not yet a sufficient threat and that they are capable of becoming one.
No Intel ? Without them joining on board this might not be as useful.
If those gain widespread adoption, that leave little room for Mellanox's IB platform, hurts NVIDIA's sales of accelerator cards, and cuts AMD's and IBM's processors out of the picture entirely.
Hopefully this effort will get us rid of PCIe for good, unlike the version of CAPI available on POWER8.
It depends on how low latency they mean by 'low latency'. If it can't drive fat gaming GPUs to full utilization, PCIe will be around for a while still. Also, Intel isn't joining up, so PCIe is absolutely sticking around.
Hopefully this effort will get us rid of PCIe for good, unlike the version of CAPI available on POWER8.
What's wrong with PCIe? The devices are ubiquitous. It's point-to-point, allowing for device to device connectivity. We have external PCIe enclosures and cables. We have a healthy set of PCIe switches. This is similar. It's also point-to-point, and it has an external story. Skimming the spec, they've even thought about higher latency (200ns) links, and optical. Even with these advantages, I'm unsure how it'll work du…
The lack of IP is the reason why P8/CAPI stuck to PCIe. In the original design, CAPI was to simply reuse the PCI link layer, not the transaction layer.
With a cache-coherent system based on PCIe, especially when the coherency layer is set at L3 like on POWER8, you are looking at ~500ns latency for a single cache line. This kind of latency is just too much for many applications.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have every big name in this, including an x86 vendor. We don't need Intel. That's not a statement I can make often. :)
Intel has 99% of the server market.
If Intel were involved, then AMD would gain no strategic advantage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have every big name in this, including an x86 vendor. We don't need Intel. That's not a statement I can make often. :)
Intel has 99% of the server market.
So any HPC application that makes use of abstraction libraries for SIMD and GPGPU code can be easily moved to non-Intel processors.