CXL and Memory Expansion | Electronic Design

Compute Express Link (CXL) is becoming more important in data centers as the need for more storage grows to address artificial-intelligence (AI) needs. It can provide cache-coherent, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) to processors, GPUs, and NPUs in AI data centers to handle ever-larger AI models. CXL is built around the latest PCI Express technology much like NVMe, another storage technology.

I talked with Anil Gobaleh, Chair of the Marketing Working Group (MWG) with the CXL Consortium, about the latest advances in CXL and where it’s headed. One of the interesting aspects in our discussion is how DDR4 is being used with CXL, which targets the high end dominated by DDR5.