Competition is heating up among global memory semiconductor producers to develop compute express link (CXL)-based memory solutions.
CXL is an open, industry-supported standard for CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections. The CXL interface is a key technology that enables more innovative ways to expand memory capacity and bandwidth well beyond what is possible today.
The next-generation interface drew keen attention following Samsung Electronics' development of the world’s first CXL memory expander in May last year.
The company unveiled the industry’s first memory module supporting the CXL standard. Unlike conventional DDR-based memory, which has limited memory channels, Samsung’s CXL-enabled DDR5 module can scale memory capacity to the terabyte level, while dramatically reducing system latency caused by memory caching.
In May this year, Samsung announced its CXL Memory Expander 2.0 that carries 512 GB of DDR5 SDRAM and can add up to 16 terabytes of memory to a CPU with one-fifth of the system latency.
Samsung took a step further by announcing a CXL memory semantic SSD solution at Flash Memory Summit 2022, which was held at Santa Clara in the United States from Aug. 2-4. The new semantic SSD has 20 times faster response speed in AI and machine learning (ML) than other SSDs. Samsung not only increased its capacity but expanded its applications so that it can be used in areas that use a lot of small-sized data.
SK Hynix is focusing on development of CXL memory solutions rather than single products. “We will release a wide range of CXL-based bandwidth and capacity expansion memory solutions,” an SK Hynix official said. The company plans to increase the supply of CXL memory solutions as CXL is widely used in IT devices such as AI, the metaverse, future cars, the IoT, and 5G and 6G.
Industry insiders say that Samsung and SK have been expediting CXL-based memory technology development.
Currently, the CXL consortium includes major semiconductor giants such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Intel, Micron, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm, and big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft. In particular, SK Hynix has been actively participating in the CXL consortium since its beginning.
