Compute Express Link, or CXL, has only been in use for five years, yet it is already having an impact in connecting server components.
The technology, introduced by Intel Corp. in 2019 and designed as an open-standard interface for high-speed communications, connects a server’s central processing unit with accelerator chips attached to the machine. As AI workloads increasingly place strains on server memory capacities, CXL has found appeal among firms seeking a performance boost.
“CXL itself really solves a problem on server constraints,” said David McIntyre(pictured, left), director of product planning and business enablement — device solutions — at Samsung Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. “Servers can handle up to maybe five terabytes of dynamic random access memory, which is a huge amount of memory, but then it stops there. CXL provides memory expansion, eventually memory pooling. It basically frees up these constraints so that now you can expand out with …