As high-density information heart functions turn out to be extra commonplace, design engineers need to grapple with including reminiscence capability in a price and space-effective method. SMART Modular Applied sciences, a division of SGH has launched a household of Add-In Playing cards (AICs) which implements the Compute Specific Hyperlink (CXL®) customary and likewise helps business customary DDR5 DIMMs. In keeping with the corporate, these are the primary of their class, high-density DIMM AICs to undertake the CXL protocol.
The SMART 4-DIMM and 8-DIMM merchandise allow server and information heart architects so as to add as much as 4TB of reminiscence in a well-recognized, easy-to-deploy kind issue. Constructed with superior CXL controllers, the add-in playing cards get rid of reminiscence bandwidth bottlenecks and capability constraints for compute-intensive workloads encountered in synthetic intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and machine studying (ML). Makes an attempt so as to add extra reminiscence by way of the normal DIMM-based parallel bus interface have gotten problematic as a consequence of pin limitations on CPUs, so the business is popping to CXL-based options that are extra pin-efficient.
CXL additionally allows lower-cost scaling of reminiscence capability. Tom Quinn, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Improvement, stated in an interview with Design Information that the add-in card is a cheaper technique of including reminiscence than simply utilizing DIMM modules. In keeping with Quinn, utilizing an 8-DIMM CXL AIC with 64-GB DDR5 DIMMs would price 33% much less per terabyte than utilizing eight 64 GB DDR5 DIMMs. Changing excessive density RDIMMs with a larger variety of decrease density modules can decrease system reminiscence prices.
The add-in playing cards can be found in sort 3 PCIe Gen5 full peak, half-length (FHHL) PCIe kind issue. The 4-DIMM AIC (CXA-4F1W) accommodates 4 DDR5 RDIMMs with a most of 2TB of reminiscence capability when utilizing 512GB RDIMMs, and the 8-DIMM AIC (CXA-8F2W) accommodates eight DDR5 RDIMMs with a most of 4TB of reminiscence capability.
The 4-DIMM AIC makes use of a single CXL controller that implements one x16 CXL port, whereas the 8-DIMM AIC makes use of two CXL controllers to implement two x8 ports, each leading to a complete bandwidth of 64GB/s. Each AICs provide enhanced security measures with in-band or side-band (SMBus) monitoring functionality. With a view to speed up reminiscence processing, these add-in playing cards are suitable with SMART’s Zefr™ ZDIMMs™.
