CXL Unleashed: Samsung & Red Hat Crack Open Memory Expansion Bottleneck

Samsung has announced a collaboration with open-source software provider Red Hat, successfully validating the operation of Compute Express Link (CXL) memory in real-world user environments. This achievement, a first in the industry according to Samsung, is set to spearhead the expansion of its CXL memory ecosystem.

The burgeoning fields of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous driving, and In-Memory Databases (IMDB) are experiencing exponential growth in data throughput and memory demands. This surge necessitates systems with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. CXL, an open interconnect protocol, offers higher bandwidth, enabling rapid and efficient connections between CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. It meets the requirements of today’s high-performance heterogeneous computing by providing enhanced bandwidth and superior memory consistency. As a next-generation interface, when used alongside primary DRAM, it expands bandwidth and capacity to meet the demands of rapid data processing in the computing market.

In their latest development, Samsung optimized CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.3 and verified memory recognition and read-write operations in Red Hat’s KVM and Podman environments. This allows data center customers to seamlessly use Samsung’s CXL memory without needing additional modifications to their existing hardware. Samsung and Red Hat are also co-authoring a “RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enablement Guide” to assist users in employing Samsung’s CXL memory on this operating system and building high-performance computing systems across various user environments.

The collaboration between Samsung and Red Hat commenced in May 2022, marked by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on next-generation memory cooperation. They plan to continue developing open-source CXL and reference models through the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC). Currently, their collaborative efforts encompass a range of storage and memory products, including NVMe SSDs, CXL memory, computational memory/storage, and architecture.