[Beowulf] Nvidia and IBM create GPU interconnect for faster supercomputing

[Lockwood, Glenn]

On Mar 26, 2014, at 2:28 PM, Jason Riedy <jason at lovesgoodfood.com> wrote:
> More another shot towards fragmentation.  PCIe is something that
> (more or less) everyone can implement.  

It's not a cost thing; Intel simply has de facto control over the PCIe standard and it's only getting worse now that PCIe is integrated on-die.  Intel has no incentive to increase bandwidth for PCIe since Intel graphics are also on-die and KNL will be self-hosting (again, no PCIe bus).  Intel also owns Aries (high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect) which they'd be fools to also not integrate on-die.

Do you see a trend?

It's not a coincidence that IBM (CPUs), NVIDIA (accelerators), Mellanox (interconnects), and Tyan (integration) teamed up to form OpenPOWER.  Intel owns makes technology in every segment and has the freedom to integrate it all on-die, letting PCIe stagnate to choke out the competition.

Glenn