Omni-Path

Intel this week announced plans to discontinue its 1st Generation Xeon Scalable processors with Omni-Path interconnect a year from now. With no 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable products announced to date supporting the technology as well as already cancelled plans for Omni-Path 200 Gbps fabric, Intel is canning the whole project. Early in the decade, Intel acquired Cray’s interconnect assets as well as QLogic’s InfiniBand technology in a bid to build its own fast, highly-scalable, low-latency interconnect technology for datacenters and supercomputers. The result of Intel’s design efforts was creation of the Omni-Path network fabric technology that was developed primarily with Intel Xeon Phi-based HPC systems in mind. Indeed, Intel’s 2nd Generation Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) were the first to get Omni-Path and eventually the technology...