CAPI Flash adapter

Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) provides a high bandwidth, low latency path between external devices, the POWER8 core, and the system’s open memory architecture. CAPI adapters are placed in the PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slots, and use the PCIe Gen3 adapter as an underlying transport mechanism.

The CAPI-capable devices can replace either application programs that can run programs running on a POWER8 core or provide custom acceleration implementations. CAPI Flash adapters remove the complexity of the I/O subsystem, so that an accelerator can operate as part of an application. It results in a code path reduction, because applications can interact with the Flash accelerator directly without using the operating system kernel.