Page 43 - EngineerIT September 2022

NEW PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Microchip introduces new CXL Microchip’s data centre solutions business unit.
“We identified CXL as a disruptive technology
smart memory controllers early on and were integral to the standard’s
definition. Microchip’s continued presence in
the memory infrastructure market underscores
our commitment to improving performance and
he continuous computational demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and efficiency for a broad range of SoC applications to
machine learning (ML) workloads, cloud computing and data analytics support the increasing memory requirements of
Tdeployed on traditional parallel attached memory have reached an high-performance data centre applications.”
efficiency plateau due to the limitations of increased memory channels on a “The CXL Consortium was founded with a
processor. Microchip Technology announced the expansion of its serial-attached vision to deliver to the industry an open standard
memory controller portfolio with the new SMC 2000 series of Compute Express that would accelerate next-generation data centre
Link™ (CXL™) based Smart Memory Controllers that enable CPUs, GPUs and performance,” said Siamak Tavallaei, president,
SoCs to utilise CXL interfaces to connect either DDR4 or DDR5 memory. This CXL Consortium. “We’re pleased to see Microchip,
solution delivers more memory bandwidth per core, more memory capacity a valuable contributor to the CXL Consortium,
per core, and lowers the overall total cost of ownership in the data centre by deliver a CXL solution enabling a new ecosystem
allowing modern CPUs to optimise application workloads. for high-performance, heterogeneous computing.”
The low-latency SMC 2000 16x32G and SMC 2000 8x32G memory Microchip’s SMC 2000 CXL-based memory
controllers are designed to CXL 1.1 and CXL 2.0 specifications, DDR4 and DDR5 controllers employ an innovative design that
JEDEC standards and support PCIe® 5.0 specification speeds. The SMC 2000 delivers Reliability, Availability and Serviceability
16x32G is the industry’s highest-capacity controller with 16 lanes operating (RAS) features to transform solutions to the next
at 32 GT/s and supports two channels of DDR4-3200 or DDR5-4800, resulting level of efficiency and performance. Through CXL
in a significant reduction in the required number of host CPU or SoC pins per connectivity, the SMC 2000 external memory
memory channel. controller enables a CPU or SoC to utilise a broad
Typical CXL attached memory modules include 512 GB of memory or more, set of media types with different cost, power and
providing an effective mechanism to increase the memory bandwidth available performance metrics without having to integrate a
to processing cores. This new paradigm shift provides data centre operators unique memory controller for each different type.
with the ability to deploy a broader range of ratios for memory to CPU cores For example, using an SMC 2000 controller with
depending on their actual application needs, resulting in improved memory DDR-4 memory, advanced CPUs that only directly
utilisation and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). support DDR5 can now also re-use DDR-4 memory
“Microchip is excited to introduce our first CXL-based serial memory expansion. The dual signature authentication and
controller device to the market,” said Pete Hazen, corporate vice president of Trusted Platform support, secure debug and secure
firmware update ensure the SMC 2000 CXL-based
controller family also meets all critical storage and
enterprise application security needs.
Data centre application workloads require
future memory products that can deliver the same
high-performance bandwidth, low latency and
reliability of today’s parallel-DDR based memory
products. The CXL platform is one of the biggest
industry disruptions in recent years, bringing to
market a new standard serial interface for CPUs
to expand memory beyond the parallel DDR
interface to provide the next level of efficiency and
performance to the data centre.

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