SMART Modular, along with other industry leaders, such as Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel Corporation and Microsoft have teamed up to form an open industry standard group to develop technical specifications that facilitate breakthrough performance for emerging usage models while supporting an open ecosystem for data center accelerators and other high-speed enhancements. 

The CXL standard defines 3 protocols that are dynamically multiplexed together before being transported via a standard PCIe 5.0 PHY at 32 GT/s:

• Native Widths: x16, x8, x4; x16 partitionable: x16, 2x8, 4x4, x8 + 2x4; x8 partitionable: x8, 2x4; degraded widths: x2, x1.

• Data Rate: 32 GT/s.

• Degraded support: 8 GT/s and 16 GT/s (128b/130b).

• Independent coherency models like CXL.cache, CXL.mem to support variety of use cases in Computational Storage, Network Acceleration and Persistent Memory.

• Plug and Play: either a PCIe or a CXL card/device can be plugged in.

• Reuse PCIe® PHY, channel, circuit, Retimer, etc.

SMART NIC or video accelerators, which run specific algorithm function like video transcoding on data present in Host Memory.

FPGA or CPU based accelerators with integrated memory (like HBM or DDR).

Persistent Memory or Computational Storage devices sitting on CXL bus. Such devices cannot access Host Memory on their own.

SMART Modular develops CXL Type 3 (CXL.mem) memory products to address the industry’s need for more memory per processor core. This approach allows for a more flexible and scalable memory architecture, where memory devices can be added or removed as needed, without the need to replace or upgrade the entire system.

SMART's CXL AIC is a more economical choice for expanding memory under current system architectures. Instead of purchasing 8 128GB DDR5 RDIMMs, clients can achieve equivalent memory capacity by employing 8 64GB DDR5 RDIMMs in conjunction with an 8-DIMM CXL Add-In Cards (AICs). This configuration results in a remarkable reduction in costs, amounting to 50%.