CCIX Consortium Triples Number of Member Companies and Announces Availability of Specification

New members range from silicon providers to rich ecosystem of partners including design, verification, software, and system vendors

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 11, 2016 -- The CCIX consortium today announced that it has tripled its membership and has released the specification to consortium members. Founding members, AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Qualcomm Technologies Inc., and Xilinx, Inc., welcome new members representing silicon providers and ecosystem partners in design, verification, software, and systems:

• Amphenol Corp.
• Arteris Inc.
• Avery Design Systems
• Atos
• Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
• Cavium, Inc.
• Integrated Device Technology, Inc.
• Keysight Technologies, Inc.
• Micron Technology, Inc.
• NetSpeed Systems
• Red Hat Inc.
• Synopsys, Inc.
• Teledyne LeCroy
• Texas Instruments
• TSMC

CCIX allows processors based on different instruction set architectures to extend their cache coherency to accelerators, interconnect, and I/O. These highly capable accelerators become a key component in the processor system. The availability of the CCIX technology gives system designers the flexibility to choose the right combination of heterogeneous components from multiple vendors and address their specific system needs.

Through close collaboration, the member companies have aligned to a CCIX specification release that addresses the need for datacenter connectivity by utilizing the prevalent ecosystem that exists today and enhancing it to enable higher bandwidth, lower latency, and full coherency. In addition, the CCIX consortium has chosen to use the PCI Express architecture as its first transport layer with additional higher speeds of 25Gbps and beyond. CCIX anticipates additional transport layers to be added in the future. Using the PCI Express standard to transport the CCIX coherency protocol eases the implementation of CCIX in processors and accelerators. It also eases the deployment of CCIX technology in servers by leveraging the existing hardware and software infrastructure.

Availability
The CCIX specification is available immediately to the consortium members. Initial products based on CCIX technology are expected in 2017.

About CCIX Consortium
The CCIX consortium includes a broad representation of industry leaders, working together to develop a single interconnect technology specification that will ensure that processors using different instruction set architectures (ISA) can coherently share data with accelerators and enable efficient heterogeneous computing – significantly improving compute efficiency for servers running data center workloads and embedded applications like 5G wireless and mobile edge computing. Member companies include: AMD (NASDAQ:AMD), Amphenol Corp., ARM, Arteris Inc., Avery Design Systems, Atos, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ:CAVM), Huawei, Integrated Device Technology, Inc., IBM (NYSE:IBM), Keysight Technologies, Inc., Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ:MLNX), Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU), NetSpeed Systems, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM), Red Hat Inc., Synopsys, Inc., Teledyne LeCroy, Texas Instruments (NASDAQ:TXN), TSMC, and Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX). To learn more visit www.ccixconsortium.com.

CCIX Consortium Quote Sheet

"AMD welcomes the first release of the CCIX specification, as well as the new members joining to establish CCIX as an open standard for local interconnect to cache-coherent accelerators," said Gerry Talbot, AMD corporate fellow and vice president of I/O and circuit technologies. "As a committed supporter of open standards, AMD looks forward to supporting the ongoing, broad collaboration on the specification and adoption of the standard within the ecosystem."

"ARM was one of the founders of the Cache Coherence Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) consortium and we welcome the new members as evidence of the group's growing importance," said Vincent Korstanje, vice president of marketing systems and software, ARM. "This open standard multichip coherency protocol will enable new innovative, flexible, performant and efficient infrastructure solutions."

"Exploding data center requirements are driving our industry to create system architectures that more efficiently process data using combinations of heterogeneous processing elements including CPUs, GPUs and custom hardware accelerators," said Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris. "Arteris is excited to participate in the development of heterogeneous cache coherent interconnect protocol standards that will ease the creation of these new architectures and improve system scalability and flexibility."

"Atos is looking forward to contributing to CCIX. For many years we have been offering accelerated servers as part of our Bull HPC offer, even before accelerated solutions proliferated for big data analytics and deep learning. We set a great store on openness, and the CCIX framework will be capital to move to the next generation of open accelerated solutions," explains Jean-Pierre Panziera, chief technology director for Extreme Computing at Atos.

"CCIX is the latest interface standard for data center accelerators, and we are committed to making this part of our broad portfolio of design and verification IP," said Dino Bekis, vice president, product marketing, IP Group at Cadence. "As an early member of the CCIX consortium, Cadence is actively working to deliver IP that will speed the availability of CCIX-compliant products in the marketplace."

"The CCIX consortium is driving the standardization of coherent interconnect technology for accelerators," said Gopal Hegde, VP/GM Data Center Processor Group at Cavium. "Cavium ThunderX® has led the industry by being the first ARM®v8-based server processor to market with dual socket cache coherency and integrated accelerators for targeted Hyperscale Data Center workloads. We are pleased to participate in this multi-vendor collaboration and we look forward to playing an active role."

"IBM continues its commitment to openness and to participation in industry wide collaboration that results in meaningful choice for our clients." said Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of POWER Development. "Being part of multiple industry bus initiatives adds to the technology options that can be leveraged to meet the various demands of our clients. We confirmed the industry's interest in coherency over PCIe on POWER8 with our CAPI protocol, and joined CCIX to contribute to this technology and enable its integration into a future generation of IBM microprocessor."

"IDT's strategy in data center is to provide all of the essential low-latency interconnect, high-speed memory interfaces, power management and timing solutions around accelerators and processors needed to make real-time and time-bound applications work seamlessly," said Sean Fan, IDT's vice president for the Computing and Communications Division. "As members of CCIX, we intend to contribute IDT technical and product expertise from over two decades in PCI, PCIe, RapidIO and memory technologies to enable the formulation of CCIX-based systems to solve systems problems in an open industry collaborative framework."

"The CCIX consortium mission is to enable greater data center performance and efficiency, levering existing and well established eco-systems," said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We are happy to see and take part in this large vendor collaborations, and excited to see the fast pace of the specification development. We plan to incorporate the CCIX specification, to bring standard cache coherency, faster data speeds and lower data latency for the data center, in our future smart interconnect solutions."

"While memory has always been an essential building block for computing, it is quickly becoming the critical technology to unlocking next-generation performance." said Tom Eby, vice president and GM of Micron's compute and networking business. "Because open standards present the best opportunity for rapid innovation, the CCIX consortium is an important step in ensuring that developing architectures can quickly adapt to capitalize on the dramatic benefits provided by new memory technologies."

"As a leader in providing on-chip cache coherent interconnect solutions, NetSpeed is delighted to be working with CCIX to extend coherency across chips to enable next generation high performance solutions to customers in data center, cloud and hyperscale segments." said Sundari Mitra, CEO and co-founder of NetSpeed Systems.

"Open architectures and open standards drive innovation in the industry," said Chris Bergen, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies. "We look forward to next generation solutions enabled by the intersection of leading edge processing and acceleration technologies."

"Red Hat's drive for standardization across all tiers of the datacenter makes CCIX a great convergence point for enabling community-powered open source innovation using a coherent interconnect, running across several processor architectures," said Tim Burke, vice president, Platform Engineering, Red Hat. "Combining multiple consortia efforts under CCIX helps to lower adoption barriers and chart a path towards open and innovative solutions based on workload acceleration technologies. Red Hat looks forward to driving the convergence of open source infrastructure layers allowing bare metal, virtualized and container workloads to generically capitalize on a variety of hardware accelerators."

"New standards such as CCIX support industry-wide interoperability while enabling designers to use standards-based IP to reduce their time-to-market," said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP and prototyping at Synopsys. "As a contributor to the CCIX working group, Synopsys is helping to drive the first generation of this new, high-performance specification. With more than ten years of PCI Express leadership, we our leveraging our expertise to develop a CCIX IP solution that will enable designers to improve the bandwidth, latency and coherency of their cloud computing SoCs."

"Xilinx is delighted by the enthusiastic response to the CCIX effort by the industry. We welcome the new members who are further energizing the consortium as we create a full ecosystem to enable the design and deployment of upcoming CCIX based systems," said Gaurav Singh, vice president of Architecture at Xilinx and CCIX Chair. "Accelerators are becoming ubiquitous in the data center and CCIX will unleash their full capabilities while complementing the processor's performance."