Samsung develops new DRAM memory tech for data centres

Seoul: Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday it has developed a new DRAM memory technology based on the Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect standard that can upgrade the performances of data centres.

Samsung unveiled the industry's first Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) DRAM memory module that supports the advanced CXL interface.

CXL is an open industry-standard interconnect based on the PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 interface that enables high-speed, low latency communication between the host processor and devices, such as accelerators, memory buffers and smart input/output devices.

Unlike conventional DDR-based memory, which has limited memory channels, Samsung said its CXL-based DRAM module can expand its memory capacity to the terabyte level while reducing system latency.

Such a memory module will be ideal to meet the demands of data-intensive applications, including artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in data centres, it added.

Samsung said it applied an enterprise and data centre solid state drive form factor (EDSFF), which is used for large capacity solid state drives, to expand the memory capacity of its CXL-based DRAM, reports Yonhap news agency.

The world's largest memory chip producer also incorporated several controller and software solutions like memory mapping, interface converting and error management, so that the computing system can recognise the CXL-based memory and utilise it as the main memory.

Samsung has been collaborating with data centre, server and chipset manufacturers to develop next-generation interface technology since the CXL consortium was formed in 2019.

The South Korean tech giant said its new DRAM module has been successfully verified on next-generation server platforms from Intel Corp., and it plans to commercialise the product in the future.