Samsung steps up CXL development with Red Hat-certified infrastructure

Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest maker of memory chips, announced Tuesday it built the industry’s first certified Compute Express Link infrastructure, a crucial step not just for its product verification, but also for creating an open-source ecosystem.

Samsung Memory Research Center, located in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, received the certification from Red Hat, the world’s leading open-source solutions provider, which allows the tech giant to directly verify CXL-related products, software and others that configure servers.

CXL is a next-generation interface that supports smooth connections between the central processing unit and memory chips, accelerating data processing.

Together with the High Bandwidth Memory chip, the new technology is widely seen to boost data processing for artificial intelligence data centers as it can expand memory capacity drastically while reducing the costs for facility operations.

According to Samsung, CXL products verified at its certified SMRC would be qualified to request product registration with Red Hat, enabling faster product development. The company will also be able to provide tailored solutions to customers by optimizing products at earlier stages of development, Samsung added.

Customers using Red Hat-certified products can build high-performance systems by receiving world-class Linux support, complementing the stable hardware operation of Samsung.

Now the chip giant has verified its CXL Memory Module DRAM product for the first time in the industry at the SMRC this month. Previously, the company also verified its CXL memory and data center solid-state drives with Red Hat.

“We’re very pleased that our partnership with Red Hat is able to deliver CXL memory products with enhanced reliability to our customers,” said Song Taek-sang, 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.”

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

Samsung has been leading the still-nascent CXL sector over the past years.

The company introduced the industry's first 128-gigabyte DRAM to support CXL 2.0 in May 2021, and developed the industry's first software development solution for CXL memory.

In May 2023, the company developed the industry's first CXL DRAM supporting the technology, starting mass production later in the year.

Meanwhile, amid growing demand for high-performance computing, companies have seen increasing efforts to speed up the commercialization of cutting-edge technologies. Intel, which produces about 80 percent of the CPUs for servers, unveiled Xeon 6, its next-generation processor for data centers that supports CXL 2.0 technology.

According to Yole Intelligence, the global CXL market is expected to grow rapidly from $1.7 million in 2022 to $2.1 billion in 2026, marking sixfold growth annually.

CXL DRAM would take about 70 percent of the market, earmarking $1.5 billion in 2026, the market tracker said.

Samsung is one of the 15 founding members of the global CXL consortium established in 2019 to develop technical specifications for emerging models of next-generation technology, promoting an open ecosystem for data center accelerators. Currently, 240 members participate in the consortium, including Intel, Nvidia, and AMD.