According to its latest Meet the Experts webinar, AMD wants to be able to offer Compute eXpress Link, a manufacturer-independent memory technology, within three to five years. For this, hardware requirements must be met and at the same time the increased ranges of PCI-E 5.0 and later 6.0 are ideal for this. Read more about this below.
As part of its Meet-the-Experts webinars, AMD typically presents hardware and software innovations to a broader audience. Sometimes this information is crucial and predictable like the new AM5 chipset right before the release of the AM5 platform and sometimes there are surprising innovations. AMD’s next announcement should also fall into the latter category. According to this, Californians now want to bring CXL memory technology to desktop CPUs within three to five years.
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Compute eXpress Link (CXL) aims to improve performance, ensure latency is reduced and simplify memory expansion by adding other storage media to the same group as the system’s DRAM. You can think of it as memory expansion with an SSD as a cache, although that’s an oversimplification. However, unlike Intel’s Optane, which was not able to prove itself and has since been discontinued, CXL should have broad support across manufacturers.
AMD and Intel are working on this with other manufacturers. The CXL specification is an open standard primarily intended to be used as a cache between the CPU, main memory, and other accelerators such as graphics cards. However, due to the protocol, the actual implementation is relatively complex and requires hardware implementation in components. The first CXL-capable processors are AMD’s Epyc Genoa and Intel’s Sapphire Rapids, which implement the concept around PCI-E 5.0.
It is said that the newer revisions, which are still in the development stage, are already based on PCI-E 6.0 and support other features such as memory pooling and sharing. AMD’s new server chips will already be available on the 10th of November. Expectedly, while Intel intends to launch the new processors early next year. Since AMD has not set a corresponding compatibility date for its desktop chips, a release should not be expected before 2024, when PCI-E 6.0 hardware is expected.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
