The risk of leaking confidential information or committing an export violation is too great (it might be slim, but it's non-zero). I personally trust Adblock Plus on my personal devices (Adblock Browser single-handedly makes iOS usable for me) but a) they're a German company, b) companies get compromised, and c) plugins can potentially be compromised even if their authors are not.
On the contrary Mellanox's involvement might be why Nvidia is missing from the list. Membership likely costs a bunch of money and why would they pay it twice when they are buying a founding member. They'll just switch the name to Nvidia once the acquisition is complete.
I was kind of hoping that Intel would migrate to optical interconnects to move data around. Their silicon photonics technology would lend itself nicely to their chiplet strategy since those use similar but slightly different processes. Jumping go optical for their socket-to-socket and socket-to-coherent-accelerator would be straight forward means of scaling upward since motherboard traces don't become a limitation. This would also permit external chassis cabling to be leveraged in an optical fashion, allowing for designs to really scale upward in terms of socket count. I've only seen this done by IBM and SGI (now HPE) do this in previous systems and something I thought would become far more mainstream.
I do think it is a detriment that Intel is doing their own thing alongside CCIX, Gen-Z and OpenCAPI. CCIX and OpenCAPI are also based off of PCIe PHY and at least at a high level it looks like it was possible to adhere to both of those and have PCIe fall back. I was hoping that long term those two standards would merge into one and everyone live happily ever after. If Intel went optical, they'd have a better justification for doing their own thing. Then again, with a PCIe 5.0 fall back, it isn't going to be the end of the world either, just suboptimal.
The one last thing that stands out is that Mellanox is on that list. They are currently being absorbed by nVidia and I suspect that this plan was in place before that announcement.
Given how much Intel was pushing optical interconnects the fact they are sticking with copper probably means they can't get the costs in line. IMO optical makes a lot of sense for connections off the board (like thunderbolt, but even those cables still have copper in the bundle) but optical doesn't make a lot of sense when you are in the same box. It would needlessly add a ton of cost to have a bunch of optical/electrical connections switching back and forth between copper and fiber especially when you already need the copper for power. Unless they can get the optical to copper transfer silicon down to a penny or less it's just extra cost for little benefit (and there are significant negatives such as the copper/fiber switches adding latency translating back and forth and you can't have fiber in a trace on a board).
IMO optical only make sense in external cables, when it's in the same box or on the same board there's no reason to use it over copper.
Intel's silicon photonics process was supposed to be the next big thing to bring prices of high speed optical down to consumer levels. The reason optical was being looked at for main buses as that the signal propagation between sockets was getting longer (think of how many DIMM slots Cascade Lake-AP can have between sockets) while data rates were expected to increase per pin. That is a loosing situation for copper. Even PCIe 4.0 is needing signal repeater to reach one end of the board on consumer systems. For example several AMD Ryzen boards are only supporting PCIe 4.0 data rates only to the first 16x PCIe slot. PCIe 5.0 has even tighter restrictions on length which is going to be a major issue on server platforms which have lots of lanes. For servers, DIMM slots are often found parallel to PCIe slots for airfow and pose a routing restriction as well. Reaching the first slot on a PCIe 5.0 enabed server may require a repeater for example. This is where costs jump up with copper as the additional chips are necessary. High speed interconnects like CXL, CCIX, OpenCAPI etc. have similar restrictions since well, they use the same PCIe PHY.
This is where I would disagree on pricing. It isn't going to be a penny, rather optical has to be price competitive with the additional PCIe repeaters as PCIe 4.0 and especially 5.0 come to market. It isn't going to a simple price comparison either (and for the record, I would still expect copper to win initially here). Rather it is will be a cost-benefit analysis as optical opens up higher bandwidths over longer distances that copper cannot compete with.
Well for Intel, IBM actually has the patents for doing fiber traces in the PCB and they did demo it so works in the lab at least. IBM was expected to go migrate in this direction for their ultra highend products (mainframe, POWER) but took a bit of a right turn with POWER to cut costs and boost market share as the RISC market started to collapse a few years ago. During that era, they did have a POWER7 chip that leveraged a massive optical interconnect for supercomputing, though within each node was still copper between processors
My main point was that yes, Intel did have big plans for their silicon photonics, the fact that it died on the vine should be proof that they weren't able to get it working like they'd hoped.
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ksec - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
How does Next Gen infinity Fabric compared to CXL 1.0?edzieba - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
Being based on PCIe 5.0 rather than 4.0, CXL will effectively be double the bandwidth per lane as ngIF.ats - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
They don't. infinity fabric isn't as open I/O standard and instead fulfills the same niche as basically Intel's QPI et al.DanNeely - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
"Unfortunately we were unable to attend, however we do have the slides and the nodes, "nodes = notes?
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
Multiple video advertisements playing simultaneously is how you lose readers who can't install adblocking plugins on work computers.surt - Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - link
Not allowing the installation of ad-blocking software is how you lose valuable employees and eventually your company to more nimble competitors.Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - link
The risk of leaking confidential information or committing an export violation is too great (it might be slim, but it's non-zero). I personally trust Adblock Plus on my personal devices (Adblock Browser single-handedly makes iOS usable for me) but a) they're a German company, b) companies get compromised, and c) plugins can potentially be compromised even if their authors are not.RU482 - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
So....do you suppose nVidia will pull Mellanox out of the mix?ats - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
Only if they want to flush money away. Mellanox makes the vast majority of their money off of Intel servers.rahvin - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
On the contrary Mellanox's involvement might be why Nvidia is missing from the list. Membership likely costs a bunch of money and why would they pay it twice when they are buying a founding member. They'll just switch the name to Nvidia once the acquisition is complete.Kevin G - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
I was kind of hoping that Intel would migrate to optical interconnects to move data around. Their silicon photonics technology would lend itself nicely to their chiplet strategy since those use similar but slightly different processes. Jumping go optical for their socket-to-socket and socket-to-coherent-accelerator would be straight forward means of scaling upward since motherboard traces don't become a limitation. This would also permit external chassis cabling to be leveraged in an optical fashion, allowing for designs to really scale upward in terms of socket count. I've only seen this done by IBM and SGI (now HPE) do this in previous systems and something I thought would become far more mainstream.I do think it is a detriment that Intel is doing their own thing alongside CCIX, Gen-Z and OpenCAPI. CCIX and OpenCAPI are also based off of PCIe PHY and at least at a high level it looks like it was possible to adhere to both of those and have PCIe fall back. I was hoping that long term those two standards would merge into one and everyone live happily ever after. If Intel went optical, they'd have a better justification for doing their own thing. Then again, with a PCIe 5.0 fall back, it isn't going to be the end of the world either, just suboptimal.
The one last thing that stands out is that Mellanox is on that list. They are currently being absorbed by nVidia and I suspect that this plan was in place before that announcement.
rahvin - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
Given how much Intel was pushing optical interconnects the fact they are sticking with copper probably means they can't get the costs in line. IMO optical makes a lot of sense for connections off the board (like thunderbolt, but even those cables still have copper in the bundle) but optical doesn't make a lot of sense when you are in the same box. It would needlessly add a ton of cost to have a bunch of optical/electrical connections switching back and forth between copper and fiber especially when you already need the copper for power. Unless they can get the optical to copper transfer silicon down to a penny or less it's just extra cost for little benefit (and there are significant negatives such as the copper/fiber switches adding latency translating back and forth and you can't have fiber in a trace on a board).IMO optical only make sense in external cables, when it's in the same box or on the same board there's no reason to use it over copper.
Kevin G - Monday, April 15, 2019 - link
Intel's silicon photonics process was supposed to be the next big thing to bring prices of high speed optical down to consumer levels. The reason optical was being looked at for main buses as that the signal propagation between sockets was getting longer (think of how many DIMM slots Cascade Lake-AP can have between sockets) while data rates were expected to increase per pin. That is a loosing situation for copper. Even PCIe 4.0 is needing signal repeater to reach one end of the board on consumer systems. For example several AMD Ryzen boards are only supporting PCIe 4.0 data rates only to the first 16x PCIe slot. PCIe 5.0 has even tighter restrictions on length which is going to be a major issue on server platforms which have lots of lanes. For servers, DIMM slots are often found parallel to PCIe slots for airfow and pose a routing restriction as well. Reaching the first slot on a PCIe 5.0 enabed server may require a repeater for example. This is where costs jump up with copper as the additional chips are necessary. High speed interconnects like CXL, CCIX, OpenCAPI etc. have similar restrictions since well, they use the same PCIe PHY.This is where I would disagree on pricing. It isn't going to be a penny, rather optical has to be price competitive with the additional PCIe repeaters as PCIe 4.0 and especially 5.0 come to market. It isn't going to a simple price comparison either (and for the record, I would still expect copper to win initially here). Rather it is will be a cost-benefit analysis as optical opens up higher bandwidths over longer distances that copper cannot compete with.
Well for Intel, IBM actually has the patents for doing fiber traces in the PCB and they did demo it so works in the lab at least. IBM was expected to go migrate in this direction for their ultra highend products (mainframe, POWER) but took a bit of a right turn with POWER to cut costs and boost market share as the RISC market started to collapse a few years ago. During that era, they did have a POWER7 chip that leveraged a massive optical interconnect for supercomputing, though within each node was still copper between processors
rahvin - Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - link
My main point was that yes, Intel did have big plans for their silicon photonics, the fact that it died on the vine should be proof that they weren't able to get it working like they'd hoped.mode_13h - Wednesday, April 17, 2019 - link
> For example several AMD Ryzen boards are only supporting PCIe 4.0 data rates only to the first 16x PCIe slot.AFAIK, those are current-gen boards that weren't really designed for PCIe 4.0, but where it's just being enabled via BIOS update.
SydneyBlue120d - Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - link
What about AMD and Qualcomm?Smell This - Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - link
That would be GenZ -- CCIX/CAPI
► https://genzconsortium.org/about-us/membership/mem...
Smell This - Tuesday, April 16, 2019 - link
Funny how AT didn't mention there were twice as many members in the GenZ Consort, which includes ARM, Google, MS, etc, too ...