IBM, Google, others to unveil new open interface

The open interface will help corporate and cloud data centres to speed up big data, analytics and other emerging workloads

Technology giants IBM, Google and seven others have joined hands to launch an open specification that can boost data centre server performance by up to ten times, to take on Intel.

The new standard, called Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI), is an open forum to provide a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification. The open interface will help corporate and cloud data centres to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics and other emerging workloads. The consortium plans to make the OpenCAPI specification available to the public before the end of the year and expects servers and related products based on the new standard in the second half of 2017, it said in a statement.

Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is known to protect its server technologies and has chosen to sit out of the new consortium. In the past also, it had stayed away from prominent open standards technology groups such as CCIX and Gen-Z. “As artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics become the price of doing business in today’s digital era, huge volumes of data are now the norm,” Doug Balog, general manager for IBM Power, told Reuters.

“It’s clear that today’s data centres can no longer rely on one company alone to drive innovation,” Balog said.

Advanced Micro Devices, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, Mellanox Technologies, Micron Technology, NVIDIA and Xilinx are also members of the OpenCAPI consortium.