Samsung Electronics Co. has achieved a significant milestone by setting up the industry’s first Compute Express Link (CXL) infrastructure certified by Red Hat Inc., the global leader in open-source solutions. This pioneering infrastructure, established at the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) in Hwaseong, Korea, enables rapid development and customization of CXL products for various customers.
The South Korean memory chip giant, which also holds the position as the world’s largest, announced the successful establishment of this infrastructure on Tuesday. This new system allows for direct verification of server configuration elements, including CXL-related products and software, courtesy of Red Hat’s certification.
Earlier this month, Samsung successfully validated its CXL memory module DRAM (CMM-D) using this infrastructure, marking another first in the semiconductor industry. The Red Hat certification means Samsung can now immediately register CXL products with Red Hat after verification at the SMRC, significantly speeding up product development cycles.
This development comes just six months after Samsung validated its CXL memory product’s interoperability on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.3, an enterprise Linux OS developed by Red Hat, in December last year.
CXL is a unified interface standard connecting various processors, such as CPUs, GPUs, and memory devices. It is expected to see increasing demand in the era of artificial intelligence and machine learning due to its capability to expand memory capacity and bandwidth significantly.
According to Yole Intelligence, the CXL market is projected to grow from $1.7 million in 2022 to $2.1 billion by 2026, with CXL memory solutions accounting for $1.5 billion of this market.
Samsung’s competitor, SK Hynix Inc., is also actively developing CXL memory products, highlighting the competitive and expanding nature of the CXL ecosystem.
Since forming the CXL consortium in 2019 with tech giants like Nvidia, Google, AMD, Arm, Intel, and IBM, Samsung has been at the forefront of developing next-generation interface technology. The company’s collaboration with Red Hat, formalized in a memorandum of understanding in May 2022, underscores its commitment to advancing CXL technology and expanding the CXL ecosystem.
