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Google datacenters

Today, Intel owns the information centre market place. The but challenger in the x86 space, AMD, in one case claimed a significant share of that market, but has been all-simply eliminated after years of noncompetitive CPU architectures. AMD has been driven to unmarried-digit market share, though the visitor hopes to take back some of it with its upcoming Zen processor, due adjacent year. Other vendors, similar IBM or ARM, take an even smaller market share than AMD. That could modify in the next few years, yet, and Google has flung its support behind a new interconnect standard, OpenCAPI, and IBM's POWER9 CPU architecture.

In a blog post on Friday, Google announced that information technology had joined the OpenCAPI consortium, a group dedicated to developing a side by side-generation set up of interconnects for servers and data centers. If this is giving you lot a sense of déjà vu, never fear — the Gen-Z proclamation we covered last week also concerned a large group of companies that are developing a next-generation interconnect, and most of the same companies are members. Gen-Z aims to develop an interconnect standard for storage devices, heterogeneous accelerators, and pooled memory using memory semantic fabric, while OpenCAPI uses DMA semantics. Google and Nvidia are the only two members of OpenCAPI that aren't too members of Gen-Z.

In its blog post, Google documents a new server it has developed, the Zaius P9 (which implements the OpenCAPI standard).

LaGrange

Zaius is designed to apply 2 IBM POWER9 LaGrange CPUs with support for DDR4 (xvi DIMM slots per CPU, 32 total), along with two xxx-chip buses handling inter-CPU communication. POWER9 will include support for PCI Express Gen 4, with 84 lanes spread betwixt the 2 processors. PCIe 4.0 isn't expected to be finalized until 2017, and there's no word on when consumer hardware will actually be available. Power9 is expected in 2017, just we don't know when Google's Zaius specifically volition debut. The chips themselves volition target a 225W TDP, well higher up nearly of Intel'south hardware.

The goal of these new interconnect initiatives is to challenge Intel'southward dominance in this space. OpenCAPI is a project Nvidia has prominently planned to support with the enterprise version of its Pascal architecture, and AMD has its ain reasons for cooperating with such efforts. If it wants to win back space for Zen, it may take decided throwing its own lot in with competitors working on new interconnects is the right way to exercise that. At that place's precedent for doing this — back in 2003, it was AMD's HyperTransport bus and its support for "glueless" multi-socket systems that gave the company a prominent advantage over Intel in the multi-socket server market. Even afterwards dual and quad-core chips were available, Opteron continued to outperform some of its Core 2-equivalents in multi-socket configurations, at least for a little while.

The threat to Intel is in the terminal line of Google's weblog postal service, where the company writes: "We look forward to a future of heterogeneous architectures within our cloud. And, as we proceed our commitment to open innovation, we'll continue to collaborate with the manufacture to ameliorate these designs and the product offerings available to our users."

That might seem like a mild sentence, only it's a shot across the bow. Google is prominently backing Intel's primary competitors, and given the consistent downturn in the PC industry, you tin bet that Intel is taking whatsoever and all threats to its data center market extremely seriously.