The ongoing computational demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads, cloud computing, and data analytics deployed in traditional parallel attached memory have reached an efficiency plateau due to the limitations of increasing memory channels in a processor.
announced the expansion of its portfolio of daisy-chained memory controllers with the new SMC 2000 series of Compute Express Link (CXL)-based intelligent memory controllers that enable CPUs, GPUs and SoCs to use CXL interfaces to connect DDR4 or DDR5 memory.
This solution provides more memory bandwidth per core and more memory capacity per core to reduce the overall total cost of ownership in a data center by enabling modern CPUs to optimize application workloads.
SMC 2000 16x32G and SMC 2000 8x32G low-latency memory controllers are designed to CXL 1.1 and CXL 2.0 specifications, DDR4 and DDR5 JEDEC standards, and support PCIe Specification 5.0 speeds. The SMC 2000 16x32G is the industry's highest capacity controller with 16 lanes operating at 32 GT/s and supports two channels of DDR4-3200 or DDR5-4800, resulting in a significant reduction in the required number of host CPU or SoC pins per memory channel.
Typical CXL-attached memory modules include 512 GB of memory or more, providing an effective mechanism for increasing the memory bandwidth available to processing cores. This new paradigm shift provides data center operators the ability to deploy a wider range of memory to CPU core ratios depending on the actual needs of their applications, resulting in better memory utilization and lower TCO.
“Microchip is excited to introduce our first CXL-based serial memory controller device to the market,” said Pete Hazen, corporate vice president of Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit. “We identified CXL as a disruptive technology from the beginning and were an integral part of setting the standard. Microchip’s continued presence in the memory infrastructure market underscores our commitment to improving the performance and efficiency of a wide range of SoC applications to support the growing memory requirements of high-performance data center applications.”
Microchip's SMC 2000 CXL memory controllers employ an innovative design that delivers reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) capabilities to transform solutions to the next level of efficiency and performance. Through CXL connectivity, the SMC 2000 external memory controller enables a CPU or SoC to use a broad set of media types with different cost, power and performance metrics, without having to integrate a unique memory controller for each different type.
For example, using an SMC 2000 controller with DDR4 memory, high-end CPUs that only support DDR5 directly can now also reuse DDR4 memory expansion. Dual signature authentication and Trusted Platform support, secure debugging, and secure firmware updates ensure that the CXL-based SMC 2000 family of controllers also meets all critical enterprise application security and storage needs.
Data center application workloads demand future memory products that can deliver the same high-performance bandwidth, low latency and reliability as today's DDR-based parallel memory products. The CXL platform is one of the industry's biggest innovations in recent years, bringing to market a new standard serial interface for CPUs to expand memory beyond the parallel DDR interface to provide the next level of efficiency and performance for the data center.
“The CXL Consortium was founded with the vision of providing the industry with an open standard that would accelerate next-generation data center performance,” said Siamak Tavallaei, president of the CXL Consortium. “We are pleased to see Microchip, a valued contributor to the CXL Consortium, deliver a CXL solution that enables a new ecosystem for heterogeneous, high-performance computing.”
To support customers in building cutting-edge CXL-compliant systems, the SMC 2000 comes with design materials and the ChipLink diagnostic tool that provides comprehensive debugging, diagnostics, configuration, and analysis tools with an intuitive GUI.