CXL Picks Up Steam In Data Centers


CXL is gaining traction inside large data centers as a way of boosting utilization of different compute elements, such as memories and accelerators, while minimizing the need for additional racks of servers. But the standard is being extended and modified so quickly that it is difficult to keep up with all the changes, each of which needs to be verified and validated across a growing swath of h... » read more

Adapting To Broad Shifts Essential In 2022


Change creates opportunity, but not every company is able to respond quickly enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Others may respond too quickly, before they properly understand the implications. At the start of a typical year, optimism is in plentiful supply. Any positive trend is seen as continuing, and any negative is seen as turning around. Normally the later in the year that... » read more

Improving Memory Efficiency And Performance


This is the second of two parts on CXL vs. OMI. Part one can be found here. Memory pooling and sharing are gaining traction as ways of optimizing existing resources to handle increasing data volumes. Using these approaches, memory can be accessed by a number of different machines or processing elements on an as-needed basis. Two protocols, CXL and OMI, are being leveraged to simplify thes... » read more

CXL and OMI: Competing or Complementary?


System designers are looking at any ideas they can find to increase memory bandwidth and capacity, focusing on everything from improvements in memory to new types of memory. But higher-level architectural changes can help to fulfill both needs, even as memory types are abstracted away from CPUs. Two new protocols are helping to make this possible, CXL and OMI. But there is a looming question... » read more

Which Chip Interconnect Protocol Is Better?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to the discuss the pros and cons of the Compute Express Link (CXL) and the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) with Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP; Richard Solomon, technical marketing manager for PCI Express controller IP at Synopsys; and Jitendra Mohan, CEO of Astera Labs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


VESA published the DisplayPort 2.0 standard, which allows for a max payload of 77.37 Gbps, a 3X increase in data bandwidth performance compared to DisplayPort 1.4a. The latest release also includes capabilities to address beyond 8K resolutions, higher refresh rates and HDR support at higher resolutions, multiple display configurations, and support for 4K-and-beyond VR resolutions. It is backwar... » read more

Taking Steps Toward Hybrid Memory


What is the memory subsystem of the future, and how do we get there? Since our Hybrid Memory research program began, Rambus Labs and its industry partners and collaborators have made significant progress under the banner of OpenPOWER and OpenCAPI Foundations, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor (mP) architecture. Rambus Labs is using the Wistron POWER9 systems’ Ope... » read more

Pushing DRAM’s Limits


If humans ever do create a genuinely self-aware artificial intelligence, it may well exhibit the frustration of waiting for data arrive. The access bandwidth of DRAM-based computer memory has improved by a factor of 20x over the past two decades. Capacity increased 128x during the same period. But latency improved only 1.3x, according to Kevin Chang, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon Universit... » read more

Targeting And Tailoring eFPGAs


Robert Blake, president and CEO of Achronix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss what's changing in the embedded FPGA world, why new levels of customization are so important, and difficulty levels for implementing embedded programmability. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: There are numerous ways you can go about creating a chip these days, but many of the prot... » read more

Architecture First, Node Second


What a difference a node makes. A couple of rather important changes have occurred in the move from 16/14 to 10/7nm (aside from more confusing naming conventions). First, companies that require more transistors—processor companies such as [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"], AMD, [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"] and [getentity id="22676" e_name="Qualcomm"]—have come to grips with t... » read more