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Google datacenters

Today, Intel owns the data center market. The just challenger in the x86 space, AMD, one time claimed a significant share of that market, but has been all-simply eliminated afterwards years of noncompetitive CPU architectures. AMD has been driven to single-digit market share, though the company hopes to take back some of it with its upcoming Zen processor, due next year. Other vendors, like IBM or ARM, accept an even smaller marketplace share than AMD. That could change in the next few years, nevertheless, and Google has flung its support backside a new interconnect standard, OpenCAPI, and IBM's POWER9 CPU architecture.

In a blog post on Fri, Google announced that it had joined the OpenCAPI consortium, a grouping defended to developing a next-generation set of interconnects for servers and data centers. If this is giving y'all a sense of déjà vu, never fright — the Gen-Z announcement we covered last week likewise concerned a large grouping of companies that are developing a side by side-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 retention semantic material, while OpenCAPI uses DMA semantics. Google and Nvidia are the merely two members of OpenCAPI that aren't also 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 use two IBM POWER9 LaGrange CPUs with support for DDR4 (16 DIMM slots per CPU, 32 total), along with 2 30-flake buses handling inter-CPU advice. POWER9 will include support for PCI Express Gen 4, with 84 lanes spread betwixt the two processors. PCIe 4.0 isn't expected to be finalized until 2022, and there'due south no discussion on when consumer hardware volition actually exist bachelor. Power9 is expected in 2022, simply we don't know when Google'due south Zaius specifically volition debut. The chips themselves will target a 225W TDP, well above most of Intel'southward hardware.

The goal of these new interconnect initiatives is to claiming Intel's dominance in this space. OpenCAPI is a project Nvidia has prominently planned to support with the enterprise version of its Pascal compages, and AMD has its own reasons for cooperating with such efforts. If information technology wants to win dorsum space for Zen, information technology may have decided throwing its own lot in with competitors working on new interconnects is the right way to do that. At that place's precedent for doing this — back in 2003, it was AMD'due south HyperTransport bus and its support for "glueless" multi-socket systems that gave the visitor a prominent advantage over Intel in the multi-socket server marketplace. Even later dual and quad-cadre chips were available, Opteron continued to outperform some of its Core 2-equivalents in multi-socket configurations, at least for a footling while.

The threat to Intel is in the last line of Google's web log post, where the company writes: "We wait forwards to a time to come of heterogeneous architectures inside our deject. And, as we keep our delivery to open up innovation, we'll continue to interact with the manufacture to improve these designs and the product offerings available to our users."

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