Marvell has announced a Compute Express Link Development Platform for cloud data centre operators and server OEMs.
The platform pairs the company’s CXL technology with the latest CXL CPUs, including the new 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors, demonstrating multi-host memory pooling on these processors.
Today, memory is a common bottleneck in cloud data centre performance, as memory performance does not scale at the same rate as CPU performance.
CXL technology eliminates this bottleneck by allowing flexible expansion and pooling of memory resources.
Addressing the memory-scaling constraint is critical for compute- and memory-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and large-scale search.
With the Marvell CXL Development Platform, cloud operators can begin to optimize their infrastructure and enable their applications to take advantage of this cutting-edge technology.
The platform provides for two CXL functions: memory expansion and memory pooling. Expansion enables the addition of memory resources at will, without the bandwidth degradation associated with traditional memory expansion using dual-inline memory module (DIMM) slots.
Pooling allows memory to be shared and dynamically allocated across CPUs rather than allocated to a specific CPU. Both functions result in higher system-wide memory resource utilization, including the ability to make use of previously stranded memory.
The announcement of the development platform is Marvell’s first public step towards CXL productisation following the company’s recent acquisition of CXL-specialist Tanzanite.
Marvell’s vision for the next-generation cloud data center is one in which the architecture is disaggregated and fully composable.
The integration of CXL technology across the company’s cloud-optimized portfolio of compute, electro-optics, networking, security and storage silicon will facilitate new data center architectures with significant efficiency and performance benefits
