Gen-Z Consortiums will transfer its technology to CXL Consortiums
Gen-Z Consortium was established in 2016. Participants include 20 manufacturers including AMD, Arm, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Micron, Samsung, Hynix, Seagate, Western Digital, etc. Gen-Z Consortium aims to develop a new open system interconnection (bus) for data centers and servers, which abstracts the management of storage elements and attaches existing memory management modes for read and write access operations, the interaction between data is more efficient and the delay is lower.
The CXL Consortium was launched in 2019. Intel joined forces with Alibaba, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, HPE, Huawei, and Microsoft to establish it. AMD and Arm subsequently joined. The new interconnection protocol Compute EXpress Link (CXL) is an open interconnection protocol that enables high-speed and efficient interconnection between CPU and GPU, FPGA, or other accelerators, meets the requirements of today’s high-performance heterogeneous computing and provides higher bandwidth and better memory consistency.
In April 2020, the CXL Consortium and the Gen-Z Consortium signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), providing an opportunity for the agreement defined by the two. It takes the form of a joint working group to encourage innovation between the two organizations to improve the level of the entire industry and ensure the interoperability of the two technologies. According to VideoCardz, the CXL Consortium and the Gen-Z Consortium have determined the synergy between the two alliances and recently signed a Letter of Intent. If all parties agree, they will transfer all Gen-Z’s technical specifications and assets to CXL Consortium.
This means that the efforts of the two alliances over the past years on related interface protocols will eventually be concentrated under the CXL Consortium, and the CXL protocol will continue to be promoted as the only industry standard. Of course, this is conducive to simplifying the technical framework, concentrating resources in one organization, eliminating the waste caused by duplication of work, and better promoting the technological development of the next-generation interconnection architecture.
