Dive Brief:
- A bevy of large tech companies are banding together to launch an open specification that can reportedly boost datacenter server performance by up to 10 times, according to an IBM press release.
- AMD, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA and Xilinx announced the new specification and a new organization, the OpenCAPI Consortium, late last week.
- The goal is to “enable corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics, and other emerging workloads,” according to the press release. Servers and products based on the new standard are expected in the second half of 2017.
Dive Insight:
The new standard, called the Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI), “removes inefficiencies in traditional system architectures to help eliminate system bottlenecks and can significantly improve server performance,” according to the press release.
Intel, the biggest server producer, has often been criticized for protecting its server technologies and declined to participate in the new consortium. The companies taking part in the consortium will conceivably be able to bypass Intel and use the new open system instead, potentially upsetting Intel’s dominance in the market.
Tech leaders say they are limited by existing legacy interfaces and proprietary approaches, and new tech is needed to enable innovation.
“It’s clear that today’s datacenters can no longer rely on one company alone to drive innovation,” Doug Balog, general manager for IBM Power, told Reuters.
