Today,
Intel owns the data center market. The only challenger in the x86
space, AMD, once claimed a significant share of that market, but has
been all-but eliminated after years of noncompetitive CPU architectures.
AMD has been driven to single-digit market share, though the company
hopes to take back some of it with its upcoming Zen processor, due next
year. Other vendors, like IBM or ARM, have an even smaller market share
than AMD. That could change in the next few years, however, and Google
has flung its support behind a new interconnect standard, OpenCAPI, and
IBM’s POWER9 CPU architecture.
In a blog post on
Friday, Google announced that it had joined the OpenCAPI consortium, a group
dedicated to developing a next-generation set of interconnects for servers and
data centers. If this is giving you a sense of déjà vu, never fear — the Gen-Z
announcement we covered last week also
concerned a large group of companies that are developing a next-generation
interconnect, and most of the same companies are members. Gen-Z aims to develop
an interconnect standard for storage devices, heterogeneous accelerators, and
pooled memory using memory semantic fabric, while OpenCAPI uses DMA semantics.
Google and Nvidia are the only two members of OpenCAPI that aren’t also members
of Gen-Z.
In its blog post, Google documents a
new server it has developed, the Zaius P9 (which implements the OpenCAPI
standard).
Zaius is designed to use two IBM POWER9
LaGrange CPUs with support for DDR4 (16 DIMM slots per CPU, 32 total), along
with two 30-bit buses handling inter-CPU communication. POWER9 will include
support for PCI Express Gen 4, with 84 lanes spread between the two processors.
PCIe 4.0 isn’t expected to be finalized until 2017, and there’s no word on when
consumer hardware will actually be available. Power9 is expected in 2017, but
we don’t know when Google‘s Zaius
specifically will debut. The chips themselves will target a 225W TDP, well
above most of Intel’s hardware.
The goal of these new interconnect
initiatives is to challenge Intel’s dominance in this space. OpenCAPI is a
project Nvidia has prominently planned to support with the enterprise version
of its Pascal architecture, and AMD has its own reasons for cooperating with
such efforts. If it wants to win back space for Zen, it may have decided
throwing its own lot in with competitors working on new interconnects is the
right way to do that. There’s precedent for doing this — back in 2003, it was
AMD’s HyperTransport bus and its support for “glueless” multi-socket systems
that gave the company a prominent advantage over Intel in the multi-socket
server market. Even after dual and quad-core chips were available, Opteron
continued to outperform some of its Core 2-equivalents in multi-socket
configurations, at least for a little while.
The threat to Intel is in the last line of Google’s blog
post, where the company writes: “We look forward to a future of heterogeneous
architectures within our cloud. And, as we continue our commitment to open
innovation, we’ll continue to collaborate with the industry to improve these
designs and the product offerings available to our users.”
That might seem like a mild sentence,
but it’s a shot across the bow. Google is prominently backing Intel’s chief
competitors, and given the consistent downturn in the PC industry, you can bet
that Intel is taking any and all threats to its data center market extremely seriously.
