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OpenCAPI Blog March 2017

It has been less than six months since the announcement of the Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI) Consortium. We are proud to say that progress has been constant, even before the October announcement last year. Membership continues to grow in the consortium since the five founding companies. There are now twenty-two members and includes the following Board Level members: AMD, Google, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA, Western Digital, and Xilinx.

Not only has membership grown, but also active participation in the development of OpenCAPI based products for 2017. Two examples of publicly announced products include IBM’s POWER9 Microprocessor at Hot Chips 2016 (OpenCAPI code named ‘New CAPI’) and the server (codenamed Zaius) which was recently exhibited by Google and Rackspace at this year’s Open Compute Project Summit. The message has been consistent. OpenCAPI product development is not only enabled, but products using OpenCAPI technology will start appearing this year along with additional demonstrations and announcements.

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is now formally creating work groups which will be announced in April. Similar to the OpenCAPI specification that was contributed to the consortium to initiate progress, there will also be an OpenCAPI design enablement work group (e.g., documentation, simulation environment, reference designs, etc.). In total, there will be a variety of work groups from which OpenCAPI members can choose to contribute and learn.

In addition to the consortium progress, the OpenCAPI specification continues to be enhanced and tuned. The most recent specification was added to the consortium website (www.opencapi.org) in early March. This update specifies a low latency memory interface that can be leveraged by memory attached to a microprocessor to further improve memory performance.

Our industry continues to propel itself into higher performance to meet the demands of cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and data analytics. OpenCAPI will play a major role in exceeding these computational demands by providing a high performance interface for coherent accelerators, advanced memory solutions, networking and more.

Visit us at www.opencapi.org. See for yourself what OpenCAPI is all about, how to join, and engage on this advanced technology!

Myron Slota ,President, OpenCAPI Consortium         Scott Graham, Chair, OpenCAPI Consortium

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