CXL™ Consortium member company Samsung participated in a recent Q&A session to discuss advantages of CXL Consortium membership, use cases for CXL technology and its expertise in memory and storage technologies. Read the full Q&A session with Samsung below.
Why did Samsung decide to join the CXL™ Consortium?
Samsung intends to lead the memory industry in meeting the demand for next-generation high-performance computing technologies that rely on expanded memory capacity and bandwidth. The CXL Consortium is where the ecosystem can come together to define standards to enable this exciting future and being a member of the Consortium allows Samsung to be an integral part of this process.
What expertise does Samsung bring to the Consortium?
Samsung brings to the Consortium its extensive expertise in memory and storage technologies, as well as its experience in contributing to and leading standards bodies. Having a strong record of delivering innovative memory technologies to the market, Samsung is enabling the CXL memory ecosystem by delivering early samples of its DRAM-based CXL memory module to key partners. For example, Samsung has already delivered functional samples to chipset vendors for validation on their next-generation server platforms.
What is the biggest advantage of CXL Consortium membership? How does Samsung participate?
Having active members in all working groups allows Samsung to participate in and help shape specification development from a memory vendor perspective. Membership is also critical in gaining insight into implementation requirements and use cases so that the development of our CXL-DDR5 memory expander module is in alignment with ecosystem demands.
What use cases will be ideal targets for CXL technology? Which market segments will benefit from CXL?
Samsung is focused on meeting the need for memory expansion in data center applications like in-memory databases, high performance computing, and AI/ML. We believe our high-capacity EDSFF Memory Expander module based on CXL 2.0 will be key in both keeping pace with the demand for memory and, by being the first memory expansion module based on CXL, proving the potential unlocked by the standard. In order to speed adoption and help our customers get the most out of CXL Memory, we will also be making major contributions to build up the supporting software ecosystem. We look forward to demonstrating example use cases of CXL memory to the industry in collaboration with our partners later this year.
What does Samsung see as CXL’s impact within your industry?
In the short to medium term, with CXL memory connected directly to the CPU, the challenge of meeting the continual demand for higher per core bandwidth and capacity can effectively be addressed. In the long term, when CXL memory – whether it be based on DRAM or a novel SCM media – and low-latency, long-reach fabrics enable true memory disaggregation, we believe innovative memory architectures will be implemented that are optimized to better match the requirements of the numerous and varied workloads brought about by the big data era. Simply stated, we see CXL ushering in a fundamental transformation in memory system architectures.
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