Edge computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and security are all applications that are important for cloud and networking service providers and can benefit from domain-specific accelerators.
Domain-specific accelerators are silicon-on-chip (SoC) devices that are optimized to deliver cost-effective acceleration of specific applications and networking functions.
The Open Domain-Specific Accelerator (ODSA) Workgroup is an industry initiative driven by seven leading silicon companies to develop an open architecture for domain-specific accelerators. This could dramatically increase the range of opportunities for service providers to accelerate edge computing and related applications.
The ODSA reference architecture, which is nearing completion, defines common component chiplets and a switching and interface chiplet to which all the other chiplets are connected. The reference architecture will support a communication agent protocol stack to implement inter-die networking. The network infrastructure offers a memory model and performance that is designed to be comparable to a monolithic architecture.