NVIDIA launches world's first high-speed GPU interconnect

SAN JOSE, USA: NVIDIA announced that it plans to integrate a high-speed interconnect, called NVIDIA NVLink, into its future GPUs, enabling GPUs and CPUs to share data five to 12 times faster than they can today.

This will eliminate a longstanding bottleneck and help pave the way for a new generation of exascale supercomputers that are 50-100 times faster than today's most powerful systems.

NVIDIA will add NVLink technology into its Pascal GPU architecture -- expected to be introduced in 2016 -- following this year's new NVIDIA Maxwell compute architecture. The new interconnect was co-developed with IBM, which is incorporating it in future versions of its POWER CPUs.

"NVLink technology unlocks the GPU's full potential by dramatically improving data movement between the CPU and GPU, minimizing the time that the GPU has to wait for data to be processed," said Brian Kelleher, senior VP of GPU Engineering at NVIDIA.

"NVLink enables fast data exchange between CPU and GPU, thereby improving data throughput through the computing system and overcoming a key bottleneck for accelerated computing today," said Bradley McCredie, VP and IBM Fellow at IBM.. "NVLink makes it easier for developers to modify high-performance and data analytics applications to take advantage of accelerated CPU-GPU systems. We think this technology represents another significant contribution to our OpenPOWER ecosystem."