Year created | 2016 |
---|---|
Created by | Gen-Z Consortium |
Website | genzconsortium |
The Gen-Z Consortium is a trade group of technology vendors involved in designing CPUs, random access memory, servers, storage, and accelerators. The goal was to design an open and royalty-free "memory-semantic" bus protocol, which is not limited by the memory controller of a CPU, to be used in either a switched fabric or a point-to-point device link on a standard connector. [1]
In November 2021, the GenZ Consortium voted to transfer all its specifications and intellectual property to the CXL Consortium. [2]
The consortium was publicly announced on October 11, 2016. [3] [4]
Members include server vendors Cisco Systems, Cray, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, and Lenovo. CPU vendor members include Advanced Micro Devices, ARM Holdings, Broadcom Limited, IBM, and Marvell. Memory and storage vendor members include Micron Technology, Samsung, Seagate Technology, SK Hynix, and Western Digital. Other members include IDT Corporation, IntelliProp, [5] Mellanox Technologies, Microsemi, Red Hat, and Xilinx. Analysts noted the absence of Intel, which announced an inter-connect technology of its own called Omni-Path a year before, and Nvidia, with its own NVLink technology. [4] [1] Gen-Z also maintains cooperation with industry alliances such as OpenFabrics, [6] SNIA, and DMTF.
The effort followed years of delays with product availability for version 4.0 of PCI Express. [7] [8] Some of the vendors also joined a group to promote the cache coherent interconnect for accelerators (CCIX) protocol on the same day. [9] At about the same time, yet another consortium formed to work on an open specification for the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI). [10]
The first version of the GenZ Core specifications was published in 2018; it defines physical link that rom both PCI Express and 50 Gigabit Ethernet physical layer (PHY) standards. The Gen-Z protocol allows for asymmetric links with more bandwidth in one direction, and supports connection topologies like point to point links, daisy-chaining, and switched fabrics. [8] The basic operations consist of simple loads and stores with the addition of modular extensions.
On April 2, 2020, the Compute Express Link (CXL) and Gen-Z Consortiums announced a memorandum of understanding (MOU), describing collaboration between the two groups. [11] [12] By October 2020, some technologies were demonstrated at the super computing conference, but no products were announced. [13]
In November 2021 the CXL Consortium and the GenZ Consortium signed a letter of intent for Gen-Z to transfer its specifications and assets to CXL, leaving CXL as the sole industry standard moving forward. [2] In January 2022, GenZ started the process of dissolving operations and transferring all assets to CXL.
HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport, is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001. The HyperTransport Consortium is in charge of promoting and developing HyperTransport technology.
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems. It is designed to be scalable and uses a switched fabric network topology. By 2014, it was the most commonly used interconnect in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, until about 2016.
PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.
Dolphin Interconnect Solutions is a privately held manufacturer of high-speed data communication systems headquartered in Oslo, Norway and Woodsville, New Hampshire, USA.
In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components in one or more integrated circuits known as a "Data Flow Management System" that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on the motherboard. Chipsets are usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining system performance.
In computing, remote direct memory access (RDMA) is a direct memory access from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one's operating system. This permits high-throughput, low-latency networking, which is especially useful in massively parallel computer clusters.
PICMG, or PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, is a consortium of over 140 companies. Founded in 1994, the group was originally formed to adapt PCI technology for use in high-performance telecommunications, military, and industrial computing applications, but its work has grown to include newer technologies. PICMG is distinct from the similarly named and adjacently-focused PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG).
In computing, an input–output memory management unit (IOMMU) is a memory management unit (MMU) connecting a direct-memory-access–capable (DMA-capable) I/O bus to the main memory. Like a traditional MMU, which translates CPU-visible virtual addresses to physical addresses, the IOMMU maps device-visible virtual addresses to physical addresses. Some units also provide memory protection from faulty or malicious devices.
Torrenza was an initiative announced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2006 to improve support for the integration of specialized coprocessors in systems based on AMD Opteron microprocessors. Torrenza does not refer to a specific product or specific technology, though the primary focus is on the integration of coprocessor devices directly connected to the Opteron processors' HyperTransport links, and other co-processors connected via PCI Express. The initiative's stated goals include improving technical and technology support for third-party developers of coprocessing devices, reducing the cost of implementing HyperTransport interfaces on these devices, and improving the performance of the integrated system. It can be argued, that the original idea behind Torrenza was successfully implemented in form of Heterogeneous System Architecture by AMD and the other members of the HSA Foundation.
OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies programming languages for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The initialism NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM is opening up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such as processor specifications, firmware and software with a liberal license, and will be using a collaborative development model with their partners.
Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) was a high-performance communication architecture owned by Intel. It aims for low communication latency, low power consumption and a high throughput. Intel planned to develop technology based on this architecture for exascale computing.
Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), is a high-speed processor expansion bus standard for use in large data center computers, initially designed to be layered on top of PCI Express, for directly connecting central processing units (CPUs) to external accelerators like graphics processing units (GPUs), ASICs, FPGAs or fast storage. It offers low latency, high speed, direct memory access connectivity between devices of different instruction set architectures.
Epyc is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system markets. Epyc processors share the same microarchitecture as their regular desktop-grade counterparts, but have enterprise-grade features such as higher core counts, more PCI Express lanes, support for larger amounts of RAM, and larger cache memory. They also support multi-chip and dual-socket system configurations by using the Infinity Fabric interconnect.
Sapphire Rapids is a codename for Intel's server and workstation processors based on Intel 7.
The cache coherent interconnect for accelerators (CCIX) protocol is the result of an effort of a joint group of computer, hardware and software component vendors: AMD, ARM, Huawei, Mellanox Technologies, Qualcomm and Xilinx.
Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open standard for high-speed, high capacity central processing unit (CPU)-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections, designed for high performance data center computers. CXL is built on the serial PCI Express (PCIe) physical and electrical interface and includes PCIe-based block input/output protocol (CXL.io) and new cache-coherent protocols for accessing system memory (CXL.cache) and device memory (CXL.mem). The serial communication and pooling capabilities allows CXL memory to overcome performance and socket packaging limitations of common DIMM memory when implementing high storage capacities.
Inspur Server Series is a series of server computers introduced in 1993 by Inspur, an information technology company, and later expanded to the international markets. The servers were likely among the first originally manufactured by a Chinese company. It is currently developed by Inspur Information and its San Francisco-based subsidiary company - Inspur Systems, both Inspur's spinoff companies. The product line includes GPU Servers, Rack-mounted servers, Open Computing Servers and Multi-node Servers.
Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) is an open specification for a die-to-die interconnect and serial bus between chiplets. It is co-developed by AMD, Arm, ASE Group, Google Cloud, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC.