Micron has actually presented memory expansion modules that support the 2.0 generation of Compute Express Link (CXL) and included as much as 256GB of DRAM running over a PCIe x8 interface.CXL is an open adjoin basic with wide market assistance that is suggested to be a connection in between devices enabling the direct sharing of contents of memory. It is constructed on top of PCI Express for coherent memory access in between a CPU and a gadget, such as a hardware accelerator, or a CPU and memory.PCIe is usually used in point-to-point communications, such as SSD to memory, while CXL will ultimately support one-to-many communication. Up until now, CXL is capable of basic point-to-point communication only.Development on the CXL standard started in early 2019, but it has only recently come to market because it required a much faster PCIe bus as well as native assistance from CPU vendors Intel and AMD. Just their most recent CPUs support it.For now, the preliminary applications revolve around connecting DRAM to a PCIe user interface. That’s what Micron is offering with its CZ120 memory expansion modules. The modules are readily available in 128GB and 256GB capabilities, which is pretty big for a memory module. They utilize a special dual-channel memory architecture capable of providing an optimum of 36GB/s of bandwidth.Ryan Baxter, senior director of the information center sector at Micron, stated security features were vital in this release.”There are a great deal of security functions in 2.0 that do not exist or are not supported in 1.1,” Baxter stated. Security is very important when you have servers speaking with each other.
The CXL 2.0 basic now supports any-to-any interaction file encryption through making use of hardware velocity developed into the CXL controllers. This suggests that silicon service providers do not have to develop file encryption security into their own hardware.Baxter said that an absence of security is why consumers screening and releasing CXL 1.1 tended to just experiment and utilize lower capability memory. Some consumers might have deployed CXL 1.1 in some internal work, however numerous avoided doing anything actually ambitious while they awaited 2.0, he said. CXL 2.0 will also support persistent memory, which shops information and memory like NAND flash but is much faster, practically as quickly as DRAM. CXL 2.0 allows unique PMEM support as part of a series of pooled resources.Micron sees 2 key main usage cases for CXL 2.0: adding memory to a system to provide extra memory to a CPU under heavy workload; and supporting bandwidth intensive workloads, because the PCIe specification is really faster than
memory slots.So, guess which work they have in mind?”We’re seeing [interest] with AI training and reasoning, where these usage cases are driving a much bigger memory footprint around the CPU,”stated Baxter.
He also cited more traditional uses, such as in memory databases, as benefiting from CXL 2.0 memory capacity.CXL has a lot of prepared obsolescence in it. The 2.0 variation is not backwards compatible with 1.1, and the 3.0 variation will not work with 2.0, because 3.0 utilizes the next generation of PCIe. Baxter does not anticipate to see considerable 2.0 use and product availability till at least next year if not 2025. Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc. Source
