Samsung has arguablyturned its memory technology innovation all the way up to 11 recently. Earlier this year, the company announced the revolutionary AI-based HBM-PIM memory and today, it has announced the industry's first DDR5 memory solution to run on the Compute Express Link (CXL) interface.
The South Korean giant says that the next-gen DDR standard will enable the movement of enormous amounts of data due to the massive capacities that it will offer. Of course, these high-capacity memory modules aren't built for home usage, at least not for the foreseeable future, and are instead designed for high-performance computing needs like AI, big data, and more. As such, moving to the CXL standard will be helpful for IT industries.
High-performance computing has been gradually trending towards heterogeneity where the host and the co-processors have to work together efficiently and a coherent interconnect standard is essential. Compute Express Link (CXL) provides this capability, as it is an open-standard interconnect based on PCIe 5.0 and is cache-coherent, making it ideal for next-gen high-performance heterogeneous computing.
Alongside designing the hardware, Samsung adds that it has made several changes to the memory controller as well as the software, which includes memory mapping, interface converting, and error management.
The new CXL-based DDR5 has been validated on Intel's next-gen server platform, likely the upcoming Sapphire Rapids platform which is meant to succeed the current Ice Lake SP Xeon lineup. You can find more details about Samsung's new memory here.
