Intel employees did not allow to bury Omni-Path and created their own company to develop it
As you may remember, a little over a year ago, Intel’s management decided to abandon the development of a fundamentally new interconnect – the Omni-Path bus. The development of the second-generation OPA200 bus with a bandwidth of 200 Gbps has been stopped. Intel has surrendered to the market with its massive interest in Ethernet and InfiniBand. But the company’s specialized employees did not give up and achieved the separation of technology and related assets into a separate independent company. The Omni-Path bus will live!
A new company, Cornelis Networks, emerged from the shadows yesterday, sources say. Cornelis Networks was founded by three leading Intel developers who worked on the Omni-Path bus as part of the microprocessor giant. Cornelis Networks is headed by Phil Murphy, one of the architects of the new bus and former CEO of an interface company that was acquired in 2000 by QLogic. QLogic later sold the InfiniBand bus development department to Intel, making Murphy the last state. In other words, he is a citizen with ambition and the skills to manage the company, so it is not surprising that he was the head of Cornelis Networks.
The initial investment in Cornelis Networks was made by the specialized venture fund Downing Ventures, a division of the London investment firm Downing LLP. The volume of financing amounted to $ 20 million. Other investors in the startup were Chestnut Street Ventures and Intel Capital. The latter also received a stake in Cornelis Networks in exchange for the transferred rights, development, and assets related to the Omni-Path bus.
On the one hand, Intel got rid of the notorious “suitcase without a handle”, which is inconvenient to carry and a pity to throw away. On the other hand, according to Murphy, Intel executives failed or did not see the potential of Omni-Path, which, in his opinion, they will regret. However, technology has not been pushed back and will continue to develop through the efforts of an already independent company. This, in particular, will allow developers to attract Intel’s competitor, AMD. Although there is a danger that the position of NVIDIA, which bought Mellanox and laid its hands on InfiniBand (and now also on ARM), could ruin the life of a start-up company and those who want to create products with Omni-Path.
The current InfiniBand interface allows for 200 Gbps internetworking over a single port, which Intel did not achieve with Omni-Path. But the young team, which includes 40 Intel developers, will try to resist the efforts of NVIDIA and the InfiniBand camp. And the chances of success are definitely there, since the backlog of Omni-Path development is very large, and the start of Cornelis Networks started from a good position.
