Tech giants are working on CPU interconnect based on PCI-e 5.0

Intel, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, among others, are working on Compute Express Link. This is a cache-coherent interconnect based on the PCI-e 5.0 interface, for communication between CPUs and GPUs in data centers, for example.

The CXL partnership consists of hardware companies and internet giants that own many data centers. Currently, these are Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Intel and Microsoft, but other companies can still join, according to the organization’s website.

The CXL interconnect is intended to provide fast communication between CPUs and accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs. CXL uses the pci-e 5.0 interface, both physical and electronic, which offers a data rate of 32GT/s. That is a doubling compared to the pci-e 4.0 interface. The 1.0 specification of the Compute Express Link is available to participants of the standard.

Intel started developing the new interconnect a few years ago, writes AnandTech. The processor manufacturer has opted for a collaboration with other tech giants and the goal is to make it an open standard. Work is already underway on a 2.0 version of CXL.

By using the PCI-e 5.0 interface, it is conceivable that future Intel GPUs and FPGAs can be placed in a PCI-e slot and communicate with the rest of the system with CXL.

There are more partnerships working on new interconnects. For example, AMD and Arm are affiliated with parties such as IBM, Qualcomm and Xilinx, which are working on the CCIX interconnect. Mellanox, the company that is being acquired by Nvidia, is also part of that partnership.