AMD plans to bring CXL memory technology to consumer CPUs

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In a recent webinar, AMD unexpectedly revealed its new plan to bring Compute Express Link (CXL) technology to consumer CPUs in the next three to five years. This means that persistent memory technology will be brought to the memory bus to further improve performance. Share a large memory pool with CXL memory modules and system memory for higher performance, lower latency, and memory expansion capabilities.

Compute Express Link 3.0

Unlike Intel’s previous Optane technology, CXL has gained broad industry support through an open protocol. It is built on the physical and electrical interface of the PCIe standard, which not only enables high-speed and efficient interconnection between CPU and GPU, FPGA, or other accelerators to meet the requirements of today’s high-performance heterogeneous computing but also supports various types of memory. The CXL Alliance was established in 2019, and Intel and AMD are both members, and the CXL specification has now reached version 3.0.

According to TomsHardware, AMD’s webinar covered a number of topics, including AM5 platforms, DDR5 memory, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs. In response to the question of why storage devices aren’t connected to the memory bus, AMD’s Senior Developer Manager Leah Schoeb explained that persistent memories (like SSDs) and memory currently communicate with different protocols, preventing communication.

“[…]It’s not that in the future, we won’t be bridging that communication. That’s something that we’re looking at with technologies such as CXL. So you’ll find over the next, you know, three to five years, you’ll see it first in the server area, but you’ll find moving down into the client [consumer] area, ways that we can make sure that memory and storage can communicate on the same bus through CXL.“

Phison’s Senior Manager of Technical Marketing, Chris Ramseyern also added on this topic, saying that this is another ecosystem-type project, and it takes everyone’s joint efforts to achieve this. These collaborations have propelled PC development over the past few years, with both sides announcing anything in the space for now. The first CPUs to support CXL are coming soon though, with AMD’s EPYC codenamed Genoa and Intel’s Sapphire Rapids processors both having early revisions to the specification built around the PCIe 5.0 interface.

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