A number of big names in the datacentre industry get together to form the OpenCAPI Consortium, an organisation pushing an open specification designed to accelerate datacentre server performance.
Industry stalwarts forming the consortium include AMD, Dell EMC, Google, HPE, IBM, Mellanox, Micron, Nvidia and Xilinx. Their work on the OpenCAPI standard spans the entire datacentre, since it covers advanced memory, accelerators, networking and storage through a high-bandwidth, low latency open interface design promising data rates reaching up to 25Gbps, higher than the current PCIe specification's 16Gbps.
It joins CCIX and Gen-Z as a next generation of datacentres, and the 3 standards having the backing of over 30 top IT companies. OpenCAPI should appear in a number of upcoming products, such as IBM Power9-based servers, a Google-Rackspace server design codenamed "Zaius," Mellanox interconnect solutions and Xilinx FPGAs.
The specification will be fully available to the public at no cost before end 2016, and vendors interested in creating products using it will be able to do so by either joining the consortium or obtaining a license.