Intel Takes AMD’s Example and Plans Server Interconnect Technology

A completely integrated way of interconnecting servers, blades and the communication adapters seems the next major step in the server world. Initially, this was done mostly on supercomputers and very large server setups that required a certain specification to be fulfilled.

AMD’s SeaMicro has already developed the Freedom Fabric technology that consists in dedicated chips that offer a fully integrated way to interconnect the server boards.

The Freedom Fabric interconnect from AMD offers an impressive 1.28 Tb/s bandwidth which translates into 1.25 GB/s.

Intel’s vice president of the Architecture Group, Mr. Raj Hazra reportedly said that the new interconnect technology practically will virtualize the I/O and will tie together storage and networking in data centers.

The technology is still far away from being implemented, but Intel will not use separate chips like AMD’s Freedom Fabric is implemented right now.

Intel’s plan is to directly integrate this into the Xeon server processors and this will not happen in the following year.

The projected bandwidth is desired to be around 100 GB/s and that’s a whole lot faster than what AMD has right now.

The major difference is in the fact that the concept is quite differently implemented.

Linking the storage and networking inside a server through a 100 GB/s bandwidth link is something out of this world, but we think it will become a little bit clearer once Intel decides on the broad lines of the implementation.

Right now the company is accepting the fact that this technology is necessary and that R & D funds must be allocated in this direction.

One other impressive advantage Mr. Raj Hazra mentions is the fact that all the added transistors will only add a few watts of power draw to the Xeon CPU.