| Great link. Next Platform in general has great coverage, imo. I like how they do indeed quickly dive into: isn't it weird there's another fabric being made, when CXL is supposed to be arriving any day now? Ethernet (UALink) vs PCI (CXL) forever & ever, perhaps! What's kind of weird/interesting is that it sounds like originally the idea to scale out Infinity Fabric was going to be on PCIe switch hardware, and this sounds like a bit of a pivot to using Layer 1 (which doesn't cover much!) Ethernet: > The kernel of the Ultra Accelerator Link consortium was planted last December when CPU and GPU maker AMD and PCI-Express switch maker Broadcom said that the xGMI and Infinity Fabric protocols used to link its Instinct GPU memories to each other and also to the memories of CPU hosts using the load/store memory semantics of NUMA links for CPUs would be supported on future PCI-Express switches from Broadcom. But now using Ethernet signaling. Cool future though: > AMD is contributing the much broader Infinity Fabric shared memory protocol as well as the more limited and GPU-specific xGMI, to the UALink effort, and all of the other players are agreeing to use Infinity Fabric as the standard protocol for accelerator interconnects. The notion that HyperTransport-next is back again as an industry wide accelerator is kind of sweet! (I'm assuming Infinity Fabric is largely an incremental update but for all we know it might be all new?) |