• Opening Up The Server Bus For Coherent Acceleration

    October 17, 2016

    When IBM started to use the word “open” in conjunction with its Power architecture more than three years with the formation of the OpenPower Foundation three years ago, Big Blue was not confused about what that term meant. If the Power architecture was to survive, it would do so by having open specifications that would allow third parties to not only make peripherals, but also to license the technology and make clones of Power8 or Power9 processors.

    One of the key technologies that IBM wove into the Power8 chip that differentiates it from Xeon, Opteron, ARM, and Sparc processors is …

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  • Raising The Standard For Storage Memory Fabrics

    October 12, 2016

    People tend to obsess about processing when it comes to system design, but ultimately an application and its data lives in memory and anything that can improve the capacity, throughput, and latency of memory will make all the processing you throw at it result in useful work rather than wasted clock cycles.

    This is why flash has been such a boon for systems. But we can do better, and the Gen-Z consortium announced this week is going to create a new memory fabric standard that it hopes will break down the barriers between main memory and other storage-class memories on …

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  • Weaving Accelerators Into The Memory Complex

    July 14, 2016 Mark Funk

    In the first part of this series on the proposed Cache Coherence Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) standard, we talked about the issues of cache coherence and the need to share memory across various kinds of compute elements in a system. In this second part, we will go deeper into the approach of providing memory coherence across CPUs and various kinds of accelerators that have their own local memory.

    A local accelerator could potentially be anything. You want something to execute faster than what is possible in today’s generic processors, and so you throw specialized hardware at the problem. Still, …

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  • OpenPower: Accelerated Computing Will Be The New Normal

    November 16, 2015

    IBM did not just stake the future of its Power chip and the systems business on which it depends on the OpenPower Foundation, a consortium now with 160 members after more than two years of cultivation by Big Blue and its key early partners – Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Tyan. It has staked its future in the systems business on the idea of accelerated computing, which means using a mix of processors and accelerators to maximum performance and minimize costs and thermals for specific workloads.

    It is hard to argue that the future of computing in the datacenter is …

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