![]() ![]() At the same time, IBM and several other companies founded the OpenPOWER Foundation to build an ecosystem around Power based technologies, including CAPI. It was designed by IBM for use in its POWER8 based systems which came to market in 2014. Memory intensive and computation intensive works like matrix multiplications for deep neural networks can be offloaded into CAPI-supported platforms. Especially in the datacenter, improving the interconnect became paramount in moving toward a heterogeneous architecture in which hardware becomes increasingly tailored to specific compute workloads.ĬAPI was developed to enable computers to more easily and efficiently attach specialized accelerators. In many applications, accelerators struggle with limitations of the interconnect's performance (bandwidth and latency) or with limitations due to the interconnect's architecture (such as lacking memory coherence). Where large performance gains have been realized, it was often associated with increasingly specialized compute units, such as GPU units added to the processor die, or external GPU- or FPGA-based accelerators. Over the decade that followed, few commercial CPU products exceeded 4 GHz, with the majority of performance improvements now coming from incrementally improved microarchitectures, better systems integration, and higher compute density-this largely in the form of packing a larger numbers of independent cores onto the same die, often at the expense of peak operating frequency (Intel's 24-core Xeon E7-8890 from June 2016 has a base operating frequency of just 2.2 GHz, so as to operate within the constraints of a single-socket 165 W power consumption and cooling budget). Here both projects ran into a thermal scaling wall, whereby heat extraction problems associated with further increases in operating frequency largely outweighed gains from shorter cycle times. The performance scaling traditionally associated with Moore's Law-dating back to 1965-began to taper off around 2004, as both Intel's Prescott architecture and IBM's Cell processor pushed toward a 4 GHz operating frequency. It offers low latency, high speed, direct memory access connectivity between devices of different instruction set architectures. Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface ( CAPI), is a high-speed processor expansion bus standard for use in large data center computers, initially designed to be layered on top of PCI Express, for directly connecting central processing units (CPUs) to external accelerators like graphics processing units (GPUs), ASICs, FPGAs or fast storage.
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