Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and PLDA®, an industry leader in high-speed interconnect IP, today announced a joint collaboration to meet the challenges of next-generation connectivity for advanced workloads. Gen-Z is a new open interconnect protocol and connector developed by the Gen-Z Consortium to solve the challenges associated with processing and analyzing huge amounts of data in real time. HPE and PLDA are working together to develop Gen-Z semiconductor IP designed to the Gen-Z Core Specification 1.0.

Announced in February 2018, the Core Specification 1.0 enables the industry to begin the development of products that incorporate the Gen-Z interconnect protocol.

Creating one standard interconnect is important because it allows any component – processing, memory, accelerators, networking – to talk to any other component as if it were communicating with its own local memory using simple commands. PLDA’s Gen-Z IP will provide the building blocks to create high performance low latency solutions where every device in the system is connected at the speed of memory.

“PLDA is proud to collaborate with HPE to provide comprehensive design IP to silicon providers to enable volume production of Gen-Z compatible components and to enable system vendors to utilize the Gen-Z silicon components to build network, storage and compute systems and solutions,” said Arnaud Schleich, CEO, at PLDA. “This will enable an open ecosystem of Gen-Z building blocks for a variety of solutions from the intelligent edge to the cloud.”

With Gen-Z, the industry can simultaneously support memory, I/O, storage and different forms of compute on a common disaggregated, composable or memory-semantic fabric (or interconnect).

Gen-Z reflects a broader industry trend that recognizes the importance and role of open standards in providing a level playing field to promote adoption, innovation and choice. By enabling technologists to collaborate and contribute to an open and competitive ecosystem, Gen-Z will help the industry fundamentally change how the world thinks about computing.

“At HPE, we recognize the need to partner in the development of new architectures and technologies that can effectively meet the needs of our customers,” said Mark Potter, CTO, HPE and Director, Hewlett Packard Labs. “HPE is committed to supporting open standards and working collaboratively to develop this new interconnect. The collaboration with PLDA is a demonstration of HPE’s commitment to the development and industry-wide proliferation of Gen-Z, an important technology in meeting the demands of the modern data center and in creating a Memory-Driven Computing architecture.”

With Gen-Z, the industry can combine fast persistent memory, DRAM and task-specific processing and accelerators on a fast memory fabric without legacy constraints or device hierarchies. This approach optimizes and simplifies system configurations to deliver optimal performance tailored to specific user demands simply and efficiently with better performance at reduced cost.