Sept. 26, 2022 –
By Gary Hilson, EETimes (September 23, 2022)
Many vendors are just mastering 2.0 features as 3.0 adds more functionality.
The Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol is arguably the fastest-evolving specification in the computing world, with the third iteration published just a bit longer than three years after its inception. But even with many vendors developing CXL products, there is a lot of work to be done to build out the ecosystem.
The recent Flash Memory Summit provided a forum for the latest features of the protocol, as well as myriad vendors outlining how they are contributing to the ecosystem. It was also a platform to announce further consolidation of related standards under the CXL group, which recently became a formal consortium.
Regardless of where they fit into this ecosystem, a recurring theme was that the CXL spec is revolutionary rather than evolutionary, unlike other protocols like PCI Express (PCIe) that have been steadily plugging away for more than a decade.