CXL® Consortium member company Tanzanite Silicon Solutions recently took part in a Q&A session to discuss Tanzanite’s experience in the industry, the benefits of CXL Consortium membership, and how CXL technology will enable a variety of use cases in the cloud, enterprise, and at the edge. Continue reading the full Q&A interview to learn more about Tanzanite Silicon Solutions.
Can you share a brief introduction of Tanzanite?
Tanzanite Silicon Solutions is developing silicon and systems for the “Composable Data Center” market focused on providing Compute Express Link® (CXL®) based products.
Tanzanite’s TanzanoidTZ architecture and purpose-built design of a “Smart Logic Interface Connector” (SLICTZ) System on a Chip (SoC) enables independent scaling and sharing of memory and compute in a pool with low latency within and across server racks. The Tanzanite solution provides a highly scalable architecture for exascale level memory capacity and compute acceleration, supporting multiple industry standard form-factors, ranging from E1.S, E3.S, memory expansion board, and memory appliance.
Why did Tanzanite decide to join the CXL® Consortium?
Tanzanite’s leadership vision and product plans are based on the CXL standard; we are working closely with partners and end customers for the development and deployment of these products. Tanzanite’s product plans incorporate some of the advanced concepts and standards that are being defined or discussed in CXL 2.0 and next generation CXL specifications. By formally joining the CXL Consortium, Tanzanite can help define future CXL specifications and connect with the various working groups and the larger ecosystem of CXL Consortium members.
What expertise does Tanzanite bring to the Consortium?
With decades of experience in building complex silicon and systems in the areas of processors, accelerators, networking, and memory systems, Tanzanite is uniquely positioned to contribute and help define the CXL specification. Its deep experience in scalable fabric, SoC, and cache designs will bring valuable perspectives to the CXL Consortium. Also, the company’s expertise in memory expansion and pooling, with large scaling capabilities will enrich the Consortium’s efforts in enabling the next generation datacenter design.
Recently, Tanzanite also showcased the industry’s first memory pooling demo with its ASIC mapped to FPGA, working with future versions of Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc CPUs. Bringing relevant experience in computer and systems architecture and leading the way in demonstrating the value of CXL for emerging use cases, Tanzanite will help accelerate the adoption of CXL-based products and solutions in the datacenter and enterprise industries.
What is the biggest advantage of CXL Consortium membership? How does Tanzanite participate?
Being a member of the CXL consortium, Tanzanite will be able to:
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Participate and build partnerships across the larger ecosystem of CXL Consortium members.
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Gain early visibility into the Consortium’s directional approach and the evolution of the CXL specification.
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Influence and contribute to the definition of the CXL specification by leveraging learnings from its early implementation of advanced CXL use cases of memory pooling and memory persistency.
What use cases will be ideal targets for CXL technology? Which market segments will benefit from CXL?
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For next-generation processors, with ever increasing CPU core counts, the CXL memory expansion feature will help increase the memory bandwidth and capacity per CPU core.
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Memory pooling across hosts will enable resource optimization, concurrent execution of very large memory footprint applications, as well as applications with smaller footprints.
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Leading cloud providers with composable datacenter architectures will be able to provide scalable, secure, resilient, and efficient resource utilization of compute, accelerators, a mix of DRAM, persistent and storage class memories.
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CXL’s broad definition and applicability in a multitude of use cases will benefit the Hyperscalers, Enterprise and distributed cloud at the Infrastructure Edge.
What does Tanzanite see as CXL’s impact within your industry?
CXL is a game changing technology that will enable a variety of use cases in the cloud, enterprise, and at the edge. CXL.cache and CXL.mem protocols will inherently create a different paradigm of how memory is attached to CPUs. The protocol will also enable composability of exascale-level memory configurations visible to a single CPU socket while paving the way for an emerging architecture of near memory compute for AI/ML workloads. Memory pooling among multiple hosts will enable the dynamic composition of CPU and memory resources for efficient execution of heterogeneous workloads while reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Interested in participating in the CXL Consortium Member Spotlight blog series? Contact press@computeexpresslink.org for details.