Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully built a Compute Express Link (CXL) infrastructure certified by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions.

Elements that configure servers, from CXL-related products to software, can now be directly verified at the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) located in Hwaseong, South Korea. Once CXL products are verified by Samsung, they can immediately be requested for product registration to Red Hat, enabling faster product development.

Marking its first achievement through the infrastructure, Samsung has successfully verified its CMM-D product for the first time in the industry this month. The company can also provide tailored solutions to customers by optimizing products at earlier development stages.

“We’re very pleased that our partnership with Red Hat is able to deliver CXL memory products with enhanced reliability to our customers,” said Taeksang Song, Vice President and Head of the New DRAM Solution Development Team at Samsung Electronics. “Through our continued collaboration spanning software and hardware, we will remain at the forefront of developing innovative memory solutions as well as the CXL ecosystem.”

Kyeong Sang Kim, Red Hat Korea GM said, “The optimization of Samsung’s hardware for Red Hat’s software underscores the value of open source technology as an imperative when it comes to expanding next-generation memory solutions such as CMM-D. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Samsung to further extend CXL solutions to the market.”

Following the successful CXL memory verification by Red Hat for the first time in the industry last December, Samsung has also been certified for datacenter SSD products. Customers using Red Hat-certified products can build high-performance systems by receiving world-class Linux support, complementing the stable hardware operation of Samsung.

Samsung and Red Hat have also been working closely together in various areas, including product certification for both hardware and software, enriching the next-generation CXL ecosystem.

At the Red Hat Summit held in Denver, Colorado, in May, Samsung demonstrated its CMM-D¹ embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3, which enhances the performance of Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM).

The demo utilized the Scalable Memory Development Kit’s (SMDK) Memory Interleaving software technology, highlighting improved memory access performance. SMDK-equipped CMM-D allows customers to build high-performance AI models, without having to make significant investments, by accelerating the data processing, AI learning and inferencing speeds.

Through their strong partnership, Samsung and Red Hat aim to provide customer solutions suitable for a wide range of user systems while introducing new technology standards to an array of partners and customers and expanding the CXL memory ecosystem.

¹ CMM-D is Samsung’s CXL Memory Module DRAM, a DRAM solution based on the PCIe interface that supports the CXL protocol.

COVID-19 has sped up digital transformation by several years, and advances in AI technology have sped right along with it, leading to a significant increase in demand for AI. Large-scale adoption of AI is already taking place in key industries, from the automotive sector and finance to healthcare and education, as seen through innovations like self-driving cars and chatbots. At the same time, the range of applications for AI is expanding fast, driving impressive advancements in areas like image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing.

A New Memory Solution for the AI Era

In recent years, as data throughput has increased rapidly, it’s stressed the limits of existing computing systems. AI data throughput has been rising tenfold each year,¹ and current computing systems don’t offer memory capacities large enough to handle the sharp increase in data volumes.

Currently, a central processing unit (CPU) can hold up to 16 DRAMs (a maximum of 8 terabytes (TB)) — a number far smaller than what’s needed to handle the massive stores of data used in AI and machine learning. The need for a memory platform that supports fast interfaces and easy scalability is becoming all the more clear as the age of AI draws ever nearer. Recently, a new DRAM module based on Compute Express Link (CXL) has emerged as a promising memory solution for the AI era. So too have processing-in-memory (PIM) and computing storage equipped with a memory-based AI processor.

CXL: An Interface Pushing the Boundaries of Memory Capacity and Server Flexibility

What makes CXL a next-generation memory platform and such a promising solution to current computing limitations? In short: scalability.

CXL is a new interface that’s designed to enhance the efficiency of a computing system’s memory, CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU). In conventional platforms, devices like memory and storage have their own interfaces that link them to the CPU. But going through all these different interfaces to communicate with one another creates latency, slowing down operations. And with the massive growth in data being used for AI and machine learning, latency issues have only gotten worse.

CXL is part of a next-generation interface that will be applied to PCIe 5.0. By integrating multiple existing interfaces into one, directly connecting devices and enabling them to share memory, CXL addresses those limitations and creates new data pathways that are faster and more efficient. This next-generation memory solution is the reason why CXL has been receiving so much attention.

In line with this trend, in May of 2021, Samsung Electronics introduced the CXL Memory Expander, a first-of-its-kind CXL-based software development solution, and began promoting CXL memory solutions. The main advantages of CXL are as follows:

• Unrivaled Memory Expansion

Similar to a solid state drive (SSD), which is an external storage device, the CXL Memory Expander enables DRAM capacity to be expanded when installed in the location where the SSD is inserted. In other words, it enables an IT system’s DRAM capacity to be expanded simply by improving the interface and without having to modify the existing server structure or change it altogether.

• Streamlined Data Handling

A key benefit of the Memory Expander is its efficient data processing. By expanding higher bandwidth, it enables different devices to share memory and leverage their resources more effectively. They can then use the accelerator’s memory as if it were main memory by sharing common memory areas. Devices without their own internal memory can also take advantage of that main memory and use it as their own.

• Accelerated Computing Speed

Minimizing latency issues (or delays) caused by increases in data throughput is a key function of the CXL Memory Expander. The Memory Expander leverages both the accelerator and the CPU to improve system computing speeds, supporting much smoother and more rapid data processing.

As it stands, many in the industry are still unfamiliar with the concept of the CXL interface. Although the technology is still in its early stages, its potential to drive more efficient data processing is pushing it to be viewed as a driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In preparation for the rapidly approaching AI era, Samsung Electronics will help expand the CXL ecosystem by introducing everything from CXL memory hardware to a software solution called the Scalable Memory Development Kit (SMDK), and will lead the market with next-generation memory solutions that are capable of accommodating the fast-evolving landscape of data processing.

¹ Source: OpenAI (2019)

The CXL interconnect is an open, industry-backed standard that enables different types of devices such as accelerators, memory expanders and smart I/O devices to work more efficiently when processing high-performance computational workloads.

“In order for data center and enterprise systems to smoothly run next-generation memory solutions like CXL, development of corresponding software is a necessity,” said Cheolmin Park, Vice President of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “Today, Samsung is reinforcing its commitment toward delivering a total memory solution that encompasses hardware and software, so that IT OEMs can incorporate new technologies into their systems much more effectively.”

CXL Memory Adoption Made Easier Without the Need for Application Modifications

Samsung’s SMDK enables the main memory and the CXL memory expander to work together seamlessly in heterogeneous memory systems. The extensive software kit consists of libraries — sets of pre-built, reusable codes — and application programming interfaces (APIs) — the connections to access these software codes. Using the SMDK, system developers can easily incorporate CXL memory into advanced IT systems without having to modify existing application environments, or alternatively use it to optimize application software settings to suit special system needs.

Industry’s First Software-Defined Memory Management

The new SMDK also supports memory virtualization, allowing system designers to efficiently manage an expanded memory pool in shared memory architectures. Leveraging a proprietary Intelligent Tiering Engine, the SMDK can identify and configure the memory type, capacity and bandwidth that are most appropriate for each use case.

Samsung’s SMDK is now available on a limited basis for initial testing and optimization and will be open-sourced within the first half of next year. Samsung will continue to enhance its open-source SMDK as it closely collaborates with industry leaders in expanding adoption of the CXL memory platform for broad use in AI, edge and cloud applications.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled the industry’s first memory module supporting the new Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect standard. Integrated with Samsung’s Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) technology, this CXL-based module will enable server systems to significantly scale memory capacity and bandwidth, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in data centers.

The rise of AI and big data has been fueling the trend toward heterogeneous computing, where multiple processors work in parallel to process massive volumes of data. CXL—an open, industry-supported interconnect based on the PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 interface—enables high-speed, low latency communication between the host processor and devices such as accelerators, memory buffers and smart I/O devices, while expanding memory capacity and bandwidth well beyond what is possible today. Samsung has been collaborating with several data center, server and chipset manufacturers to develop next-generation interface technology since the CXL consortium was formed in 2019.

“This is the industry’s first DRAM-based memory solution that runs on the CXL interface, which will play a critical role in serving data-intensive applications including AI and machine learning in data centers as well as cloud environments,” said Cheolmin Park, vice president of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to raise the bar with memory interface innovation and capacity scaling to help our customers, and the industry at-large, better manage the demands of larger, more complex, real-time workloads that are key to AI and the data centers of tomorrow.”

Dr. Debendra Das Sharma, Intel Fellow and Director of I/O Technology and Standards at Intel said, “Data center architecture is rapidly evolving to support the growing demand and workloads for AI and ML, and CXL memory is expected to expand the use of memory to a new level. We continue to work with industry companies such as Samsung to develop a robust memory ecosystem around CXL.”

Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, AMD, added, “AMD is committed to driving the next generation of performance in cloud and enterprise computing. Memory research is a critical piece to unlocking this performance, and we are excited to work with Samsung to deliver advanced interconnect technology to our data center customers.”

Unlike conventional DDR-based memory, which has limited memory channels, Samsung’s CXL-enabled DDR5 module can scale memory capacity to the terabyte level, while dramatically reducing system latency caused by memory caching.

In addition to CXL hardware innovation, Samsung has incorporated several controller and software technologies like memory mapping, interface converting and error management, which will allow CPUs or GPUs to recognize the CXL-based memory and utilize it as the main memory.

Samsung’s new module has been successfully validated on next-generation server platforms from Intel, signaling the beginning of an era for high-bandwidth, low latency CXL-based memory using the latest DDR5 standard. Samsung is also working with data center and cloud providers around the world to better accommodate the need for greater memory capacity that will be essential in handling big data applications including in-memory database systems.

As the DDR5-based CXL memory module becomes commercialized, Samsung intends to lead the industry in meeting the demand for next-generation high-performance computing technologies that rely on expanded memory capacity and bandwidth.