Highlights:

  • Samsung mentioned that it fine-tuned its CXL memory technology specifically for compatibility with Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 9.3 software.
  • Samsung’s CXL memory technology is crafted to address bandwidth limitations, improving the speed, latency, and expandability of data throughput.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced a significant achievement, confirming the successful validation of its Compute Express Link memory technology in a real-world user environment in collaboration with the open-source software company Red Hat Inc.

Due to advancements in generative artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and in-memory databases, data center operators are experiencing elevated needs for data throughput and memory, according to the chipmaker. This has led to a significant demand for greater memory bandwidth and the ability to scale up.

Samsung’s CXL memory technology addresses the bandwidth limitations that affect the speed, latency, and expandability of data throughput. CXL, a unified interface standard introduced by the CXL Consortium in 2019, facilitates the connection of diverse computer chips and memory devices through a PCIe interface, offering lower latencies and faster speeds. Doing so enables existing data centers to enhance their performance at reduced costs.

Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung, describes the collaboration with Red Hat as an “exemplary case” of synergy between cutting-edge hardware and software providers. He further notes that this collaboration will significantly enhance and expedite the development of the CXL ecosystem.

Samsung confirmed that it fine-tuned its CXL memory technology for compatibility with Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 9.3 software. The tests validated its memory recognition and read and write operations within the environments of Red Hat’s kernel-based Virtual Machine and Podman.

The two businesses are currently collaborating to produce a RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enabling Guide, which will assist users in utilizing Samsung’s CXL memory products with RHEL 9.3 to construct computing systems with greater performance. Through the Samsung Memory Research Center, which was established last year and is working on creating open-source reference models for the technology, they will provide support for CXL. The collaboration with Red Hat covers several memory and storage products, such as CXL, NVMe solid-state drives, computational memory and storage, and data fabrics.

Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat’s Asia Pacific division, Marjet Andriesse, called the announcement “an important milestone in the integration of hardware and software to build an open-source ecosystem for next-generation memory development.” She emphasized the importance of this development as it allows the integration of Samsung’s CXL memory expander with Red Hat’s infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service products.

Even though Samsung is leading the way in CXL development, Intel Corp. created the technology. However, in mid-2021, Samsung became the first company globally to release a memory module that supported the most recent CXL 3.0 interconnect standard, which is built on the more sophisticated PCIe 6.0

The global CXL market, currently valued at USD 14 million, is poised for substantial growth, according to market research by Yole Group. The firm predicts that by 2028, the market will surge beyond USD 16 billion, fueled by the anticipated commercial introduction of CXL 2.0 in the latter part of the next year.