CXL Consortium member company Arm recently participated in a Q&A session to discuss its involvement in the consortium, benefits of membership, and the impact of CXL within the storage and memory industry. Read the full Q&A session with Arm below.
Why did Arm decide to join the CXL™ Consortium?
Arm represents the interest of the Arm ecosystem and more. We have a genuine interest in removing fragmentation across the Arm ecosystem and across the industry and we are a strategic choice of IP vendor for the ecosystem. We identified the need for a standard high-speed, low-latency interconnect for heterogeneous compute and memory expansion. Our interconnect IP (CMN) is committed to enabling CXL; the recently announced CMN-700 supports CXL. Arm has a proven track record in developing standards to enable innovative system designs, while ensuring interoperability with different optimized system components.
What expertise does Arm bring to the consortium?
Arm has a unique position in the ecosystem of having an architecture that is used across many different market segments and application areas. We have worked extensively with interface standards, particularly in the area of cache coherency, for both on-chip and off-chip interfacing. We bring a lot of experience in standardization of the software ecosystem.
What is the biggest advantage of CXL Consortium membership? How does Arm participate?
Arm has dedicated top-talented resources in the CXL Consortium workgroups, the Technical Task Force and the Board of Directors. Arm has also led the UEFI/ACPI sub-team of the Software and Systems workgroup to establish the proper platform interfaces and liaison with the UEFI Forum.
Our CXL Consortium membership and seat on the Board of Directors enables Arm to influence the development of CXL technology and make sure it is the interconnect choice for heterogeneous compute and memory expansion in the broad Arm ecosystem. Membership enables Arm to provide interconnect IP with CXL support to the Arm ecosystem with fast time-to-market. It enables Arm to drive CXL guidance in Arm system architecture standards to accelerate CXL adoption by the ecosystem at both the host processor and end-point devices.
What use cases will be ideal targets for CXL technology? Which market segments will benefit from CXL?
Arm’s CMN-700 core mesh interconnect, which supports CXL, is a generic IP that can be used to support a range of market segments from cloud servers, to SmartNICs/DPUs, to edge and 5G RAN devices. Arm is providing IP solutions to enable the device and host ecosystem to build disaggregated and heterogeneous computing platforms using CXL. Initial solutions like memory expansion and pooling, followed by domains-specific accelerators (DSAs) are ripe for standardization and deployment. Arm partners, which ultimately will bring silicon and solutions to market, are excited about CXL use cases including pooled and disaggregated storage as well as coherently attached accelerators such as GPUs and NPUs.
What does Arm see as CXL’s impact within your industry?
CXL is expected to add momentum to the trends of acceleration and disaggregation of resources. An industry standard like CXL can have a big impact on reducing the software and hardware complexity needed to efficiently use a broad category of emerging accelerators and memory resources.
Keep up with the CXL Blog to see future member spotlight posts from other CXL Consortium member companies. Interested in participating? Send a message to press@computeexpresslink.org for details.