Gen-Z
The Gen-Z consortium is a trade group of technology vendors involved in designing CPUs, random access memory, servers, storage, and accelerators. The goal was an open and royalty-free "memory-semantic" protocol, which is not limited by the memory controller of a CPU. The basic operations consist of simple loads and stores with the addition of modular extensions. It is intended to be used in a switched fabric or point-to-point where each device connects using a standard connector.
The consortium was publicly announced on October 11, 2016. Server vendor members include Cisco Systems, Cray, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, and Lenovo. CPU vendor members include Advanced Micro Devices, ARM Holdings, Broadcom Limited, IBM, and Marvell. Memory and storage vendor members include Micron Technology, Samsung, Seagate Technology, SK Hynix, and Western Digital. Other members include IDT Corporation, IntelliProp, Mellanox Technologies, Microsemi, Red Hat, and Xilinx.
Analysts noted the absence of Intel and Nvidia.
Some of the vendors also joined a group to promote the Cache coherent interconnect for accelerators protocol on the same day.
At about the same time, yet another consortium formed to work on an open specification for the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface.
The efforts followed years of delays before products were available with version 4.0 of PCI Express.
On April 2, 2020, the Compute Express Link and Gen-Z Consortiums have announced their execution of a Memorandum of Understanding, describing a mutual plan for collaboration between the two organizations.
