Samsung Electronics is taking the lead in commercializing next-generation memory. By taking the lead in developing CXL memory, it is expected to be able to meet the market demand for processing explosively increasing amounts of data in the AI and metaverse era and improving the efficiency of high-performance computing systems.

Samsung Electronics announced on the 10th that it has developed the industry’s first high-capacity 512GB CXL DRAM. It added that it had developed the world’s first CXL-based DRAM technology in May of last year and had been evaluating it with data centers, servers, and chipset companies, and that this time it had developed a 512GB CXL DRAM that has four times the memory capacity of existing products.

Additionally, it was explained that by installing an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit)-based controller, data delay time was reduced to 1/5 of that of existing products. This product supports PCIe 5.0 and uses the EDSFF (Enterprise & Data Center Standard Form Factor) form factor applied to large-capacity SSDs, enabling greater expansion of the DRAM capacity of existing computing systems.

CXL is a newly proposed interface to more efficiently utilize accelerators, memory, and storage devices used together with CPUs in high-performance computing systems. It has recently emerged as a technology to process the explosively increasing amount of data in the metaverse, artificial intelligence, and big data. The existing DDR interface has limitations in the DRAM capacity that can be installed in a system, so there is a continuing demand for next-generation memory solutions such as CXL DRAM.

With Samsung Electronics' recent development of high-capacity CXL DRAM, the memory capacity per server can now be expanded to tens of terabytes or more, along with the main DRAM.
Samsung Electronics plans to additionally release an updated version of its Scalable Memory Development Kit (SMDK) as open source this month, enabling developers to quickly and easily develop programs that utilize CXL DRAM technology in various application environments.

SMDK, a software development tool that helps existing main memory and CXL memory operate optimally in the next-generation heterogeneous memory system environment, consists of APIs, libraries, etc.

“As a member of the CXL Consortium, Lenovo is contributing to the development of technology standards and the establishment of a CXL-centric ecosystem,” said Greg Huff, chief technology officer of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. “We will work with Samsung Electronics to expand the application of CXL products to Lenovo systems.”

Park Cheol-min, managing director of the new business planning team at Samsung Electronics' memory business division, said, "CXL DRAM will innovatively improve services such as artificial intelligence and big data, and will expand to next-generation memory including software-defined memory in the future." He added, "Samsung Electronics is“We will actively pursue technology standardization so that the Mori ecosystem can expand rapidly, and expand CXL memory solutions to lead the next-generation memory market,” he said.

Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics is participating in the CXL Consortium board of directors and expanding cooperation with major global data center, server, and chipset companies to develop next-generation interface technology.

In addition, the company announced that the 512GB CXL DRAM developed this time will be sampled starting in the third quarter. Samsung Electronics stated that it will continue to develop next-generation memory interface products of terabytes or more and plans to commercialize them in a timely manner to meet the computing market that requires large-capacity memory.