• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Compute Express Link Consortium (CXL) Officially Incorporates

btarunr

Editor & Senior Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Oct 9, 2007
Messages
47,297 (7.53/day)
Location
Hyderabad, India
System Name RBMK-1000
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
Motherboard ASUS ROG Strix B450-E Gaming
Cooling DeepCool Gammax L240 V2
Memory 2x 8GB G.Skill Sniper X
Video Card(s) Palit GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GameRock
Storage Western Digital Black NVMe 512GB
Display(s) BenQ 1440p 60 Hz 27-inch
Case Corsair Carbide 100R
Audio Device(s) ASUS SupremeFX S1220A
Power Supply Cooler Master MWE Gold 650W
Mouse ASUS ROG Strix Impact
Keyboard Gamdias Hermes E2
Software Windows 11 Pro
Today, Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Intel Corporation and Microsoft announce the incorporation of the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, and unveiled the names of its newly-elected members to its Board of Directors. The core group of key industry partners announced their intent to incorporate in March 2019, and remain dedicated to advancing the CXL standard, a new high-speed CPU-to-Device and CPU-to-Memory interconnect which accelerates next-generation data center performance.

The five new CXL board members are as follows: Steve Fields, Fellow and Chief Engineer of Power Systems, IBM; Gaurav Singh, Corporate Vice President, Xilinx; Dong Wei, Standards Architect and Fellow at ARM Holdings; Nathan Kalyanasundharam, Senior Fellow at AMD Semiconductor; and Larrie Carr, Fellow, Technical Strategy and Architecture, Data Center Solutions, Microchip Technology Inc.



Chairman of the CXL Consortium, Jim Pappas, discussed the recent developments:
"CXL is enjoying unprecedented momentum with participation of leading companies from across all segments of the computer industry," said Pappas. "It is extremely gratifying to see the level of investment and focus on the success of CXL. We have a world-class technical team covering all of the needed disciplines to ensure success. On behalf of the CXL Board, I am delighted to welcome these new directors onto the CXL Board of Directors and look forward to their contributions to this important new technology."

CXL Specification 1.1
As accelerators are increasingly used to complement CPUs in support of emerging applications such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, CXL was designed to be an industry open standard interface for high-speed communications. The specification delivers breakthrough performance for emerging usage models while supporting an open ecosystem for data center accelerators and other high-speed enhancements—it was ratified in March 2019.

CXL technology maintains memory coherency between the CPU memory space and memory on attached devices, which allows resource sharing for higher performance, reduced software stack complexity, and lower overall system cost. This permits users to simply focus on target workloads as opposed to the redundant memory management hardware in their accelerators.

The specification is currently available to companies that join the CXL Consortium.

CXL Newly-Elected Board Members' Statements upon Election
The newly-elected Board Members to CXL made the following comments upon their confirmation to the BoD:

"CXL has achieved enough momentum to ensure that there will be broad industry participation. It is now time for IBM to bring the experience gained from 6+ years of coherent acceleration with CAPI and OpenCAPI and do our part to contribute to the CXL ecosystem." --Steve Fields, Fellow and Chief Engineer of Power Systems, IBM

"High performance, adaptable acceleration is going to be critical to meet the increasing demand for performance across a wide variety of markets," said Gaurav Singh, corporate vice president of Architecture, Verification and Systems Engineering, Xilinx, Inc. "At Xilinx, we recognized the importance of coherent links to connect processors, memory and accelerators and I am excited to join the CXL board to drive the standard forward. With the backing of hyperscale cloud providers, system OEMs, processors vendors and technology leaders like Xilinx, CXL will become a ubiquitous processor interface for memory and accelerators." --Gaurav Singh, Corporate Vice President, Xilinx

"I am delighted to be appointed as a new board member of the CXL Consortium. Arm's membership at the board level not only reflects the industry's confidence in our strong contribution to this important, emerging technology, but a shared vision to align to a truly global multi-CPU standard that will be applicable to all processor architectures." --Dong Wei, Standards Architect and Fellow at Arm Holdings, Inc.

"AMD is a strong believer in the need for heterogeneous processing to meet the exponential demand for compute, and we are pleased to join with other industry leaders to drive alignment on a common coherent interconnect standard in CXL," said Nathan Kalyanasundharam, Senior Fellow at AMD. "We look forward to collaborating with all the members of the CXL community to enable a tighter coupling and coherency between processors and accelerators, simplify programming models, and enable a new wave of innovation in accelerator and storage technologies." --Nathan Kalyanasundharam, Senior Fellow at AMD

"I am honored to be elected to the CXL Board of Directors. CXL will be a key technology to enable breakthrough memory-centric infrastructure solutions with the goal of improving datacenter performance and efficiency. Microchip looks forward to contributing to the evolution of the CXL standard, and the existing collaboration with the Gen-Z organization. --Larrie Carr, Fellow, Technical Strategy and Architecture, Data Center Solutions, Microchip Technology Inc.

Join CXL Industry Leaders
The founding promoter companies represent a wide range of industry expertise and include leading Cloud Service Providers, Communications OEMs, and System OEMs. CXL welcomes new members. Work is now underway to expand innovative use cases that leverage CXL technology as well as the development of CXL Specification 2.0 to further the standard's technical features and capabilities.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
Joined
Mar 18, 2008
Messages
5,717 (0.93/day)
System Name Virtual Reality / Bioinformatics
Processor Undead CPU
Motherboard Undead TUF X99
Cooling Noctua NH-D15
Memory GSkill 128GB DDR4-3000
Video Card(s) EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra
Storage Samsung 960 Pro 1TB + 860 EVO 2TB + WD Black 5TB
Display(s) 32'' 4K Dell
Case Fractal Design R5
Audio Device(s) BOSE 2.0
Power Supply Seasonic 850watt
Mouse Logitech Master MX
Keyboard Corsair K70 Cherry MX Blue
VR HMD HTC Vive + Oculus Quest 2
Software Windows 10 P
So this might replace pci-express one day?
 

AleksandarK

News Editor
Staff member
Joined
Aug 19, 2017
Messages
2,651 (0.99/day)
So this might replace pci-express one day?
Not exactly. PCI is the foundation of this. This protocol runs over PCI.

Problem CXL, Gen-Z, CCIX, and many others try to solve is cache coherency, which is a big problem for the future of various systems. Especially heterogeneous systems that have CPU + custom accelerator like the ones for AI/ML. See here.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jun 29, 2008
Messages
95 (0.02/day)
System Name Homemade :)
Processor Ryzen 3900X@4.35Ghz
Motherboard Asus X570 Prime Pro
Cooling Alphacool Eisbear 420 + 6x Silent Wings 3
Memory 2x16GB A-Data Gammix D10 3200-15-15-15-31@3733-19-18-18-38 1:1
Video Card(s) Palit GameRock GTX1080Ti +110 core +200 mem
Storage WD SN750 1TB + 3x Crucial MX200 500GB RAID0
Display(s) 4k TV + Benq XL2730Z
Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro
Audio Device(s) AIM 808
Power Supply Seasonic Focus Plus 850W
Mouse Logitech G603
Keyboard Razer BlackWidow Chroma
Software Windows 10 LTSC
Makes me wonder, how it is possible for AMD not to be a part of said consortium (it is ommited in companies listing) but for one of it's officers to be on the consortium board?
 
Joined
Apr 8, 2008
Messages
342 (0.06/day)
System Name Xajel Main
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
Motherboard ASRock X570M Steel Legened
Cooling Corsair H100i PRO
Memory G.Skill DDR4 3600 32GB (2x16GB)
Video Card(s) ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3080 Ti AMP Holo
Storage (OS) Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 1TB + (Personal) WD Black SN850X 2TB + (Store) WD 8TB HDD
Display(s) LG 38WN95C Ultrawide 3840x1600 144Hz
Case Cooler Master CM690 III
Audio Device(s) Built-in Audio + Yamaha SR-C20 Soundbar
Power Supply Thermaltake 750W
Mouse Logitech MK710 Combo
Keyboard Logitech MK710 Combo (M705)
Software Windows 11 Pro
Makes me wonder, how it is possible for AMD not to be a part of said consortium (it is ommited in companies listing) but for one of it's officers to be on the consortium board?

AMD's isn't one of the CXL founders, which were listed in the beginning. So they were not omitted.

The founders -not-including AMD- picked the board of directors members and the new members also, including one from AMD as AMD joined the CXL later after being founded by the original companies.
 
Top