Samsung Electronics announced the first memory module to support the new Compute Express Link interconnect standard on Tuesday. The company claimed it can boost memory for data center servers to the terabyte level.
The module, labeled a CXL Memory Expander in a Samsung photo, has been validated on Intel-provisioned server platforms, but is not yet commercially available. Samsung did not offer a timeline for when it will be shipping.
The company has integrated the CXL-based module with its Double Data Rate 5 DRAM technology to push data center servers to higher capacity and bandwidth for high performance computing and AI workloads. DDR5 alone is designed to support speeds of 51 Gbps per module with 2 memory channels per module and is sold in 8 GB modules up to 32 GB. DDR5 can be used to double the memory capacity of a PC, for example, although Samsung’s CXL variant is designed for servers used in the most demanding settings.
CXL is an open standard based on PCI Express 5.0, an interface for high-speed, low latency communications between a host processor and other devices common in data centers such as accelerators, memory buffers and I/O devices. The CXL consortium was formed in 2019 and a CXL 2.0 specification was released last November.
CSL-enabled DDR5 can scale memory to the terabyte level, Samsung claimed, while reducing system latency with memory caching. Samsung did not release any stats related to the number of terabytes or latency reduction. A DDR5 specification was finalized in July 2020 by the JEDEC consortium; based on its past specs, it should take up to 18 months from that time to produce a commercially available product. Load-reduced memory LRDIMMSs are expected to stack up to eight dies per chip, allowing up to 2TB capacity, ExtremeTech reported.
In addition to CXL, Samsung is incorporating controller and software innovations such as memory mapping, interface converting and error management. This way CPUs and GPUs can recognize CXL memory and use it as main memory, the company said.
Samsung is the world’s largest DRAM supplier, with a market share of about 42% at the end of 2020, followed by SK Hynix and Micron and a number of smaller players, according to Statista. All three companies saw revenue increases of 8.5%, 6.9% and 9.6%, respectively, in the first quarter of 2021 compared to fourth quarter 2020, TrendForce reported.
TrendForce said DRAM demand from server manufacturers saw a gradual recovery in the quarter from last year and DRAM prices overall saw an increase. All three DRAM suppliers are expected to see “considerable improvements in their profitability in 2Q21 due to surging quotes,” TrendForce added.