Over the past year, Intel held a series of purchases, giving it an additional access to the inter-processor and external connected architectures. This is the business of manufacturing of controllers InfiniBand QLogic, and Ethernet-developments of Fulcrum Microsystems, and the corresponding Cray division . It is easy to assume that the policy of integration of all and everything in microprocessors lead eventually to the need of highly integrated communication controller. In any case, this is true for server processors Intel Xeon.
Vice-President of architectural group Intel, Raj Hazra, confirmed that the company deals with integration in the Xeon processors class of so-called fabric-controllers - controllers for home and external connections at all levels: from the inter processor connections to storage systems and cluster configurations. It is easy to understand, for example, what effect such a transfer interface as InfiniBand into the processor. This saves developers server boards from integrating controllers on board or find a way to install an external adapter. It will be a huge savings not only for the money, but also for energy consumption, including issues with additional cooling. In addition, the interconnect bandwidth increases by 5-10 times!
Xeon processors will register the controllers of all kinds. A number of server solutions, such as the organization of clouds or high-performance computing requires support for different types of communication interface (for connection to consoles, racks and storage subsystems). Among other things, it will simplify the life of servers developers.
By the way, AMD is also working on the problem of integration of connected architectures. This was clearly demonstrated by its recent acquisition of SeaMicro.