Arm joins CXL and looks to be saying goodbye to CCIX interconnect

Arm joins the Compute eXpress Link consortium and will promote the move to that interconnect based on pci-e 5.0. Arm is one of the key companies behind the competitive CCIX interconnect. It now appears to be phased out.

Arm joined the CXL consortium a few months ago, but is now dedicating a blog post to it. In it, the chip designer writes that he will promote the switch to Compute eXpress Link and the company hints that it sees CXL as the future. Arm writes that it will continue to support existing applications based on the CCIX interconnect, but does not mention further developments.

The CXL consortium was set up in March and a large group of tech giants have joined it. The CXL interconnect builds on a project originally from Intel, but is now being developed as an open standard. In addition to hardware manufacturers such as AMD, Arm, Intel, Huawei, Cisco, Micron and Nvidia, software giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook are also part of the partnership.

CCIX, or the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators, was announced in 2016 by AMD, Arm, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Qualcomm and Xilinx. CCIX works on the basis of pci-e 4.0 and has been used in recent years for, for example, an ARM server processor from Huawei and an accelerator from Xilinx, notes website Serve The Home. Arm was a driving force behind the stand.

CXL and CCIX are interconnects intended to connect processors and accelerators from different manufacturers. Such techniques are used in servers and data centers.