Industry Founds Gen-Z Consortium

A group of technology companies has formed the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today’s bottlenecks, a press release states.

Alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell, EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK Hynix, Western Digital Corporation and Xilinx.

The consortium states that it provides:

Gen-Z provides the following benefits:

• High Bandwidth, Low Latency: Simplified interface based on memory semantics, scalable from tens to several hundred GB/s of bandwidth, with sub-100 ns load-to-use memory latency.
• Advanced Workloads and Technologies: Enables data centric computing with scalable memory pools and resources for real-time analytics and in-memory applications. Accelerates new memory and storage innovation.
• Compatible and Economical: Highly software compatible with no required changes to the operating system. Scales from simple, low cost connectivity to highly capable, rack scale interconnect

“AMD is committed to open ecosystems for technology development and is excited to join the rest of the Gen-Z members today in announcing this significant step. The need for high-bandwidth, low-latency access to memory and storage as well as rack-scale composability in the datacenter is growing rapidly. Gen-Z is an advanced, modern protocol designed to deliver a high-performance, cross-platform solution that can serve its members and their customers far into the future,” said Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer and senior vice president of Technology and Engineering at AMD.

For more information, visit Gen-Z.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.