CXL™ Consortium member company SMART Modular Technologies took part in a recent Q&A session to discuss its involvement in the consortium, benefits of membership, and its capabilities in the storage and memory ecosystem. Read the full Q&A session below.
Why did SMART Modular Technologies decide to join the CXL Consortium?
We joined as a Contributor member to participate and stay up-to-date on technical and marketing activities organized by CXL Consortium workgroups; understand and collaborate with industry players like CPU manufacturers, IP providers and software companies on CXL enablement; and to have early access to the specifications.
What expertise does SMART Modular Technologies bring to the consortium?
SMART Modular Technologies is a recognized Memory and Storage module manufacturer. We have been designing high-speed memory products like DDR4 DIMMs, NVDIMMs, Flash Storage products like SSDs, and new technologies including OpenCAPI, CCIX, Gen-Z and now CXL. We have in-house expertise in high-speed board design and module manufacturing. We will be announcing CXL-based memory modules shortly.
What is the biggest advantage of CXL Consortium membership? How does SMART Modular Technologies participate?
The biggest advantage is collaborating with other consortium members and industry players like CPU and ASIC manufacturers, IP developers, and software companies. We are working with various partners to bring together an ecosystem which can speed-up adoption of CXL.mem for memory expansion. Our R&D team is closely working with ASIC manufacturers to define the CXL controller which can bring down the cost of memory expansion. We are also working with IP developers to bring a FPGA-based prototype to market so that end customers can validate and customize their BIOS and software stack to make use of CXL hardware as soon as it is available.
What use cases will be ideal targets for CXL technology?
We are currently targeting the memory expansion use case via CXL.mem protocol through E1.S and E3.S form factors. These EDSFF components allow memory expansion for memory intensive applications, freeing up DDR slots for latency-critical applications.
Which market segments will benefit from CXL?
We are aligning with the CXL-enabled server and storage hardware that will be used in a wide variety of industry segments and applications – such as HPC, Data Centers, Enterprise Storage, AI/ML, Embedded Computing, Edge Computing, Network Security, Surveillance, etc. More details are available on our CXL blog.
What does SMART Modular Technologies see as CXL’s impact within your industry?
The CXL interconnect standard provides a path to increase system performance by adding cache coherent memory, storage and acceleration options.
Make sure to follow the CXL Blog to see upcoming member spotlight posts from other CXL Consortium member companies. Interested in participating? Send a message to press@computeexpresslink.org for details.