ARM, AMD, Huawei, IBM, Qualcomm, Mellanox and Xilinx team up on datacentre

ARM, AMD, Huawei, IBM, Qualcomm, Mellanox and Xilinx have joined forces to bring a high-performance open acceleration framework to data centers.

The companies are collaborating on the specification for the new Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX).

For the first time in the industry, a single interconnect technology specification will ensure that processors using different instruction set architectures (ISA) can coherently share data with accelerators and enable efficient heterogeneous computing – significantly improving compute efficiency for servers running data center workloads.

Accelerating applications in the data center has become a requirement due to power and space constraints. Applications such as big data analytics, search, machine learning, NFV, wireless 4G/5G, in-memory database processing, video analytics, and network processing, benefit from acceleration engines that need to move data seamlessly among the various system components.

CCIX will allow these components to access and process data irrespective of where it resides, without the need for complex programming environments. This will enable both off-load and bump-in-the-wire inline application acceleration while leveraging existing server ecosystems and form factors, thereby lowering software barriers and improving total cost of ownership (TCO) of accelerated systems.

“AMD strongly supports development of open standards to make heterogeneous computing more pervasive,” says AMD’s Gerry Talbot, AMD corporate fellow and vice president of I/O and circuit technologies.

“A ‘one size fits all architecture’ approach to data center workloads does not deliver the required performance and efficiency,” says ARM’s Lakshmi Mandyam, “CCIX enables more optimized solutions by simplifying software development and deployment of applications that benefit from specialized processing and hardware off-load, delivering higher performance and value to data center customers.”

“CCIX will leverage existing server interconnect infrastructure and deliver higher bandwidth, lower latency, and cache coherent access to shared memory,” said Gaurav Singh of Xilinx, “this will result in a significant improvement in the usability of accelerators and overall performance and efficiency of data center platforms.”