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AMD, ARM, Dell EMC, HPE, IBM and Samsung unite to develop high-performance interconnect

New fabric will offer several hundred Gbps bandwidth, claims Gen Z Consortium

Some of the biggest companies in computing, including ARM, Dell EMC, HPE, Huawei, IBM and Samsung, have formed an alliance with the aim of creating and commercialising a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol.

The Gen-Z Consortium was put together to develop the new high-performance fabric because existing technologies are based on the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. The increasingly low cost and, hence, adoption of SSD storage, which offers 10 times the performance of conventional hard-disk storage, has busted that consensus.

"As new storage-class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal," claimed the consortium, in a statement announcing its plans.

"The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low-latency storage-class memory, and demand for rack-scale resource pools require a new approach to data access."

The initiative aims to create a simplified interface scalable to several hundred Gbps of bandwidth with a sub-100-nanosecond load-to-use memory latency.

This, claims the consortium, will enable "data-centric computing with scalable memory pools and resources for real-time analytics and in-memory applications". It says that it will be highly software compatible and will require no changes to operating systems, although that remains to be seen.

The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium, Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK Hynix, Western Digital and Xilinx. It is also open to new members.

The organisation says that it will publish a core specification, covering the architecture and protocol, by the end of the year.

AMD, ARM, Dell EMC, HPE, IBM and Samsung unite to develop high-performance interconnect

New fabric will offer several hundred Gbps bandwidth, claims Gen Z Consortium

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