CXL Consortium and OpenCAPI Consortium Sign Letter of Intent to Transfer OpenCAPI Specifications to CXL

PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- August 2, 2022 -- The industry has been undergoing significant changes in computing. Application specific hardware acceleration is becoming commonplace and new memory technologies are influencing the economics of computing. To address the need for an open architecture to allow full industry participation, the OpenCAPI Consortium (OCC) was founded in 2016. The architecture that was defined allowed any microprocessor to attach to coherent user-level accelerators, advanced memories, and was agnostic to the processor architecture. In 2021, OCC announced the Open Memory Interface (OMI). Based on OpenCAPI, OMI is a serial attached near memory interface that provides low latency and high bandwidth connections for main memory.

In 2019, the Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) Consortium was launched to deliver an industry-supported cache-coherent interconnect for processors, memory expansion, and accelerators. In 2020, the CXL and Gen-Z Consortiums announced plans to implement interoperability between their respective technologies, and in early 2022, Gen-Z transferred its specifications and assets to the CXL Consortium.

Continuing this spirit, we announce that OCC and CXL are entering an agreement, which if approved and agreed upon by all parties, would transfer the OpenCAPI and OMI specifications and OpenCAPI Consortium assets to the CXL Consortium.

"We are pleased to see the industry coming together around one organization driving open innovation and leveraging the value OpenCAPI and Open Memory Interface provide for coherent interconnects and low latency, near memory interfaces. We expect this will yield the best business results for the industry as a whole and for the members of the consortia." – Bob Szabo, OpenCAPI Consortium President

"We are excited about this opportunity to focus the industry on specifications residing under one organization moving forward. This is the right time for our mutual members to work together to advance a standard-high-speed coherent interconnect/fabric for the benefit of the industry. Assignment of OCC assets will allow for CXL Consortium to freely utilize what OCC has already developed with OpenCAPI/OMI." – Siamak Tavallaei, CXL Consortium President

About OpenCAPI Consortium

The OpenCAPI Consortium is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2016 and is an open forum to manage the OpenCAPI specifications. OpenCAPI is an open coherent high-performance bus interface. To learn more about the OpenCAPI Consortium, go to https://opencapi.org

About the CXL™ Consortium

The CXL Consortium is an industry standards body dedicated to advancing Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) technology. CXL is a high-speed interconnect offering coherency and memory semantics using high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between the host processor and devices such as accelerators, memory buffers, and smart I/O devices. For more information or to join, visit www.computeexpresslink.org.