Today AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Qualcomm, and Xilinx announced a collaboration to bring the CCIX 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.
“CCIX enables greater performance and connectivity capabilities over existing interconnects, and actually paves the road to the next generation CPU – Accelerator – Network standard interface,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of Marketing at Mellanox. “With an anticipated broad eco-system support of the CCIX standard, data centers will now be able to optimize their data usage, thereby achieving world-leading applications efficiency and scale.”
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,” said Gerry Talbot, AMD corporate fellow and vice president of I/O and circuit technologies. “By joining with others in the industry to develop new interconnect specifications to accelerate performance, AMD continues its commitment to open, heterogeneous computing.”
