Computer Express Link (CXL) improves the way CPUs and GPUs interact with memory and accelerators, standardizing communication between devices, reducing latency, and making systems faster and more capable of handling large amounts of data—especially important for applications that require fast data processing, such as AI.
At a recent press conference, Jangseok Choi, vice president of Samsung’s new business planning team, revealed that the company was moving forward with its plans to begin manufacturing and shipping CXL-enabled memory modules.
“We plan to mass produce 256GB CXL 2.0-compatible DRAMs this year. We expect the CXL market to start to flourish in the second half of the year and grow explosively starting in 2028,” Choi told reporters.
A decade in the making
Samsung anticipates that the adoption of CXL technology will result in an eight- to ten-fold increase in memory capacity per server, translating to a substantial leap in computing capabilities. CXL “expands the highway linking the CPU and memory chips from two to three lanes to more than eight lanes,” a Samsung official explained to Korea's economic daily.
Samsung’s CXL DRAM 2.0, released in May 2023, supports memory pooling, a memory management technique that links multiple CXL memory blocks on a server platform to form a pool and allows hosts to dynamically allocate memory from the pool as needed, resulting in more efficient use of memory capacity and optimized resource allocation.
Both Micron and SK Hynix are developing CXL-based memory products, but “as the sole memory manufacturer in the CXL consortium, Samsung is committed to further expanding the CXL ecosystem through partnerships with data center, server and chipset companies across the industry,” Choi said.
“Samsung has been working on developing and mass producing high-quality CXLs for over a decade,” he added. “We are testing our products with our partners to verify their performance.”
