AMD's uses coherent fabric

The next gen Hyper-transport interconnect

AMD has come up with a new interface, interconnect technology it calls coherent fabric.

It is a new inter-chip connection that will be used in the Exascale Heterogeneous Processor (EHP) . Coherent fabric is primary interconnect for IP on AMD SOCs, APUs, CPUs and GPUs beginning with the next generation CPU SOC and followed by the Greenland GPU ASIC. Incoherant fabric is something worn by loud American tourists and is sometimes called a Hawaiian shirt.

AMD's GMI Global Memory Interconnect extends the coherent fabric between chips on the same multi-chip module (MCM) package. The coherent fabric extends between packages using combo phys which also support PCIe interconnection.

All this sounds rather complicated, but is a faster way for Zen SoC to talk to the Greenland Die on the future processors.

Coherent fabric will speed up the communication in Zen core between CPUs and Cache, Host controller eg USB, SATA or GbE, memory controllers, PSP, Timer, counter, ACPI or Legacy interface, Combo phys and GMI layers. GMI phys of Zen Die will talk directly with GMI phys of Greenland HBM 2.0 graphics die and uses coherent fabric too.

Our industry sources did not want to talk about speeds of this interconnect but it sounds rather fast. AMD's 16 core Heterogenous EHP Processor will benefit from the fast coherent fabric interconnect.

Coherent fabric is the direct competitor to Nvidia's NVlink interconnection that is expected in 2016 with the Pascal GPUs .

source: ChinaReview.mobi