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Intel and other technology companies join forces in a consortium to develop Compute Express Link. This is a new standard for high-speed interconnects between cpus and purpose-built accelerator chips in data centres.

Compute Express Link (CXL) was born four years ago within Intel and is now being launched as an open standard. Microsoft, Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, HP Enterprise and Huawei have already joined the new consortium, and the door remains open to other parties who wish to participate.

The explosion of data and the increase of specialised workloads such as compression, encryption and AI stimulate a form of heterogenous computing in the data centre, where cpus works in tandem with specialised accelerator chips such as gpus, FPGAs and memory chips.

Bottleneck

The bottleneck is the communication between the two and CXL has to be an answer to that. The standard uses the new PCIe 5.0 interface and promises speeds of up to 32 billion data transfers per second or 128GB/s over 16 lanes.

CXL maintains the memory consistency between the devices, enabling resource sharing for better performance, less complexity in the software stack, and lower overall system costs, says Navin Shenoy, General Manager of Intel’s Data Center Department.

The first generation of the CXL specification should be available to members of the consortium by the first half of this year. The first products with the technology on board, including Xeon processors, FPGAs and gpus, are expected by 2021.

Mellanox

Intel’s announcement comes just after Nvidia announced that the network specialist has acquired Mellanox for $6.9 billion. Mellanox specializes in Ethernet-based interconnects and InfiniBand for servers and data center storage. The technology of the Israeli company is in half of the 500 most powerful supercomputers worldwide and can also be found among the largest cloud providers.

Intel itself is said to have been interested in Mellanox’s technology, but at the same time thinks that CXL is an improvement on InfiniBand.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.