CXL Fulfills AI's Need for Open Industry Standard Interconnect

By Debendra Das Sharma , EETimes (July 16, 2024)

We have been in a virtuous cycle of innovation for decades now where dramatic improvements in compute capability—primarily driven by extraordinary advances in transistor and process technologies—have enabled diverse applications. These applications, including generative-AI, are driving an insatiable demand for heterogeneous computing, memory bandwidth, memory capacity and interconnect bandwidth to satisfy the demand of applications.

The need for a robust interconnect standard

While PCIe is a great interconnect, emerging data-centric applications pose a new set of challenges requiring enhancements to PCIe:

• High-performance heterogeneous computing with shared coherent memory space.
• Overcoming the memory bandwidth bottleneck of DDR parallel bus and providing tiered cost-effective memory support.
• Minimizing stranded resources in data centers by pooling memory and accelerators across multiple servers.
• Enabling distributed computing through low-latency load-store-based message passing and shared memory across a large pool of servers, including coherent near in-memory compute.

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