Tech leaders form OpenCAPI Consortium promising 10x boost to server performance

USA: AMD, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA and Xilinx have come together to announce a new, open specification that can increase datacenter server performance by up to 10x, enabling corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics, and other emerging workloads.

Many technology companies have developed innovative solutions that today’s datacenter technology cannot effectively leverage due to limited legacy interfaces. New technologies such as storage class memory and accelerators to support emerging workloads do not fit well on existing interfaces and a closed, proprietary approach does not allow for full industry participation nor innovation.

Through OpenCAPI Consortium, industry leaders are helping ensure there is freedom of action across the industry for technology companies to more closely work together and to fully integrate new innovation at the compute, storage and networking levels of a modern datacenter.

The new standard, called OpenCAPI provides an open, high-speed pathway for different types of technology – advanced memory, accelerators, networking and storage – to more tightly integrate their functions within servers.

This data-centric approach to server design, which puts the compute power closer to the data, removes inefficiencies in traditional system architectures to help eliminate system bottlenecks and can significantly improve server performance.

OpenCAPI sets a new standard for the industry, providing a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification built to minimize the complexity of high-performance accelerator design.  Capable of 25Gbits per second data rate, OpenCAPI outperforms the current PCIe specification which offers a maximum data transfer rate of 16Gbits per second.

Through OpenCAPI, the technology industry is enabled to build datacenter solutions that are better equipped for the most demanding next generation workloads. Companies in finance, Internet services, retail, hospitality, medical, and automobile manufacturing are increasingly turning to data-intensive workloads such as machine learning, advanced analytics and other rapidly emerging technologies for competitive advantage.

Servers and related products based on the new standard are expected in the second half of 2017.