Stefan Mileschin

For several months now we have been talking about Intel’s Omni-Path network fabric, the company’s next-generation 100Gbps netwoking fabric technology. Typically Omni-Path has come up alongside discussions of Intel’s forthcoming 2nd generation of Xeon Phi products, codenamed Knights Landing. With Intel designing the two products alongside each other, and with Knights Landing due later this year, the company is now opening up a bit more about Omni-Path and how it works, including a paper on the technology for the IEEE Hot Interconnects conference this week and a press briefing on the technology at last week’s Intel Developer Forum 2015.

Intel is of course no stranger to network fabrics, having produced InfiniBand gear for a number of years under their True Scale brand. In 2012 the company went on a buying spree, picking up both QLogic’s InfiniBand technology and Cray’s interconnect technology as well. The long goal for Intel has been to develop a successor to InfiniBand and True Scale, one that would scale faster, better, and cheaper. The end result of these development efforts has been the creation of Omni-Path and the surrounding ecosystem.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9561/e...network-fabric