Fabric is a common term for describing on-chip interconnects in a system-on-a-chip.
It's all the wires and buffers and pipeline registers and arbiters and decoders and muxes that connect the components together.
It's dominated by wires, typically, which is probably how it came to be known as a fabric. (Wild speculation on my part.) I've been hearing that term for a long time. Maybe 20 years?
In the case of Infinity Fabric: high speed I/O links generally consume gobs of power just to wiggle the pins, long before any control plane gets involved.
In this case, it's high speed differential signaling, and that's going to have a /lot/ of active power. There's a lot of C*dv/dt going on there!
It's all the wires and buffers and pipeline registers and arbiters and decoders and muxes that connect the components together.
It's dominated by wires, typically, which is probably how it came to be known as a fabric. (Wild speculation on my part.) I've been hearing that term for a long time. Maybe 20 years?