News Intel Cancels Omni-Path 200 Fabric and Stops Development

[Admin]

Intel has killed the Omni-Path 200 series HPC fabric, as reported by CRN, though the company will continue to support OPA100. OPA200 was supposed to launch this year.

Intel Cancels Omni-Path 200 Fabric and Stops Development : Read more

 

[bit_user]

I wonder how much the rise of EPYC had to do with the demise of OmniPath. If you have any reason to think you won't be running a 100% Intel stack, then it must call into question the idea of buying into Intel's interconnect technology.

 

[DavidC1]

I think OmniPath died because it debuted with Knights Landing processors and when that lineup got cancelled, the roadmap became blurry as that caused the delay in future OmniPath generations.

Also, OmniPath 200 needs PCIe 4 interconnect to allow such bandwidth. There are no such Intel processors.

 

[bit_user]

Also, OmniPath 200 needs PCIe 4 interconnect to allow such bandwidth. There are no such Intel processors.

Technically, PCIe 3.0 can bond up to 32 lanes. So, that probably explains a lot about why they had some CPUs with it integrated in-package.

But, that's a really good point about connectivity. I hadn't considered that. However, here's a PCIe 3.0 x8 Omni-Path 100 host adapter and a x16 dual-port card:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...erface-adapter-100-series-1-port-pcie-x8.html

Product Specifications

quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and more.

ark.intel.com

The dual-port makes more sense, since you might not have a full load on both ports, in the same direction, at the same time. But their willingness to offer a x8 single-port adapter shows they're not too concerned about being bus-bottlenecked, even in a simple uni-directional sense.

Thinking about it some more, if Infiniband can already offer 200 Gbps per direction, that puts Intel in a really bad spot, with their lack of PCIe 4. POWER has had PCIe 4 for over a year and now AMD is out there.