Tachyum has announced it has joined the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, a group of companies dedicated to advancing a new, open-industry standard interconnect designed to address the increasing demands of high-performance computational workloads. Defining an open standard could help to drive innovation and reduce costs as companies can work together to decide on a path of technological development that is beneficial to all the partners.
CXL is a high-speed CPU-to-Device and CPU-to-Memory interconnect that offers high- bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between host processors, systems and devices, such as FPGAs, intelligent networking and storage accelerators, memory buffers, storage class memory and smart I/O devices. CXL targets heterogeneous processing and memory systems across a range of high-performance computing applications by enabling coherency and memory semantics between processors and systems. This is increasingly important as processing data in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning requires a diverse mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures.
Maintaining memory coherency between CPU memory and memory on attached devices, CXL will allow resource sharing for higher performance, as well as enable reduced software stack complexity and lower overall system cost. This permits users to focus on target workloads as opposed to the redundant memory management hardware in their accelerators.
'Our ultra-low-power Prodigy Universal Processor is aimed squarely at the hyperscale data centre market,' said Dr Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Tachyum. 'With worldwide data centre capacity doubling every five years, and with AI, machine learning, and HPC rapidly migrating from purpose-built systems to the cloud, the importance of a fast industry-standard interconnect, which supports memory coherency, cannot be overstated. With the proliferation of 5G networks, facilitating the rapid growth of edge compute nodes or mini data centres, high speed interconnects with cross-platform memory coherency will become absolutely critical. We expect that CXL like coherent protocols will become an integral part of the PCI Express standard in the future.'
'For the industry, a standards-based ecosystem will be a big boost. It will open the door to innovations across many areas and I look forward to building the next generation systems', said Kiran Malwankar, VP of systems engineering of Tachyum.
Tachyum joins CXL founders Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Intel Corporation and Microsoft to promote CXL interconnect in data centre markets, working alongside leading processor manufacturers, such as AMD, ARM, and NVIDIA, as joint-CXL consortium members. Additional information about CXL is available at https://www.computeexpresslink.org.
