Intel Discontinues Omni-Path Enabled Xeon Processors

[AleksandarK]

Intel's Omni-Path technology has been used primarily in high performance computing market, in order to provide high speed interconnect between Intel Xeon CPUs, with speeds reaching around 100 Gbps. Accompanied by different design and system integration that Omni-Path uses, it was a bit difficult to integrate into server system, while not adding much value that other technologies couldn't match or beat.

Because of these reasons, Intel is now discontinuing its last product capable of utilizing Omni-Path - the first generation Xeon Scalable CPUs. Carrying the suffix "F", these CPUs had an extra connector sticking out of CPU's PCB to enable the Omni-Path functionality (see images bellow). There were eight CPUs manufactured in total that had this extra feature, consisting out of two Xeon Platinum and six Xeon Gold CPUs, which have now reached end of life. Intel states that focus from these CPUs has shifted to other technologies like silicon photonics, which provides much greater speed reaching 100s of gigabits per second. Intel already demonstrated transceivers capable of reaching 400 Gb/s speeds with the magic of light, which will become available in 1H 2020.


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[biffzinker]

Wonder how long until Intel gives up on Optane DIMMS?

 

[TheLostSwede]

This must've been one of the worst physical interfaces ever created though...

 

[AleksandarK]

This must've been one of the worst physical interfaces ever created though...

I very much agree. It would be better if they just routed it through the socked instead of it requiring a separate connector.

 

[IceShroom]

Why discontinued??? Those thing are EOL'ed not discontinued.

 

[Mike Chen]

The idea's actually good, but in overall Omnipath just can't compete with Mellanox Infiniband.
(Used Infiniband for more than 10 years, from 20Gb/s to 100Gb/s)

 

[notb]

The idea's actually good, but in overall Omnipath just can't compete with Mellanox Infiniband.

Even if slower than Infiniband, Omnipath is good enough for most systems.
And Intel is not leaving this business (like they did with 5G modems). They simply slash Omnipath to focus on other technologies.

(Used Infiniband for more than 10 years, from 20Gb/s to 100Gb/s)

You work for Mellanox and you advertise their products? What's the point of this comment?

 

[Dave Burton]

Used -F CPUs are pretty inexpensive. Does anyone know whether they'll work in Dell R640 / R740 and HP DL360 / DL380 G10 servers? (Without connecting anything to the Omnipath connector.)

 

[Steevo]

Why discontinued??? Those thing are EOL'ed not discontinued.

Imagine the thermal stress difference on that little tab, imagine trying to stuff that box and cables into a passive rack and not cause some airflow issue?


Discontinued cause just as Intel said, they made a product that didn't hold up to market scrutiny, didn't give a realized performance edge, didn't lower the total cost of the system VS existing available products.


Optical transmission doesn't suffer EMI and the bandwidth overlap in a single fiber with tuning is amazing, and receiver characteristics are only getting better and smaller. With the lack of ability or need to "store" photons in transmission VS computation the natural evolution of phonics in computing will see us all using fiber interconnects or board makers using fiber interconnects and much fewer metal layer boards soon.


Imagine a motherboard with a photon mesh communication system, 2 primary layers for 12+ and gnd and a bank of fiber connectors for the GPU, mass storage, RAM and a simple socket for the CPU. One standard communication protocol with different wavelengths for different components. We could change the look of PCs as we know it.

The space industry is suffering with radiation hardening these components and optical transmission in a EMI rich environment would be great.