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Evolving Interconnect Specifications

Introduction


Why should typical data centre and applications teams care about evolving inter-connect specifications like CXL? We care more about migrating applications to the cloud, switching to managed service models, and cloud-native application modernization, right?

Let us Explain


The performance penalties and bandwidth restrictions for data transfer between components like CPUs, GPUs, XPUs, FPGAs, memory, and storage have kept us from making fundamental improvements in the ways that we can build systems that are dynamically composable to meet workload needs, are less expensive to consume and are fast.

The industry has been making attempts to reach agreement on how best to address a solution for years. This article in the Next Platform does a good job of briefly going through the history. It also does a great job of explaining CXL use cases at a high level.

What is interesting is that the lack of a solution has really been more of a business relationship issue than one of technology. Prior to the proposed CXL standard, none of the other proposals had the backing of all of the major industry movers and shakers. While having various levels of technical merit, they were destined to die on the vine due to business politics.

The big news here is that everyone is behind CXL this time, including the companies that had previously proposed prior solutions. The list of sponsors includes Intel, AMD, ARM, Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, IBM, Dell EMC….

So now it is time for you as a regular data center/applications person to take notice of CXL developments as you are thinking about how your next generation environment should look.

Adoption and development to the CXL standard by your vendors can provide you with:

  • Performant memory sharing across all devices
  • Rack level disaggregation and communication
  • Computational Storage and Memory with Host Memory Sharing
  • Persistent and DRAM memory hierarchies

What Next?


At PTS we are working with clients on next-generation data centre initiatives and making sure that longer-range requirements are brought into focus.

Arrange a free workshop with our consultants to discuss your specific Interconnect Specifications.