AMD Joins Consortium for CXL Interconnect Based on PCI-e 5.0

AMD joins the Compute Express Link consortium, which is developing an interconnect based on the PCI-e 5.0 interface. AMD follows Intel and Arm, among others. Companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft are also involved in the development.

AMD has been involved in the development of other interconnects for a number of years, including CCIX, but says it will also join CXL because it is also an open standard and because each interconnect has a different approach.

Created by a group of tech giants in March, the CXL consortium builds on a project Intel originally started. In the meantime, several companies have joined. Arm is now also part of the partnership, which was not yet the case when it was announced. The consortium now consists of dozens of hardware and software companies.

The Compute Express Link is an interconnect for fast communication between CPUs and accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs. The interconnect uses the PCI-e 5.0 interface for this, which offers a data rate of 32GT/s. A 1.0 specification of CXL is already available and a 2.0 version is in the works. The technology is intended for servers and data centers.

Since 2016, work has also been done on the also open CCIX standard for interconnects, to which AMD makes a major contribution. Arm, Huawei, IBM, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Xilinx are also involved. Intel does not participate in the CCIX consortium. AMD is also involved in the development of the OpenCAPI and Gen-Z interconnects.

Slide from Intel presentation about CXL, The full presentation is available at Serve The Home.