SK hynix Completes Customer Validation of CXL 2.0-based DDR5

Summary:

• Completion of customer qualification of 96GB product to help customers reduce costs when applied to server systems
• 128GB product of improved performance, equipped with 1bnm 32Gb DDR5, also in customer validation process
• Company to provide value unmatched by others through ‘Optimal Innovation’

SK hynix Inc. announced that it has completed customer validation of 96GB CMM (CXL ^[1] Memory Module)-DDR5, a DRAM solution product based on CXL 2.0.The company said that it can process 36GB/s due to a 50% increase in capacity when the product is applied to the server systems and a 30% improvement in the bandwidth compared to previous DDR5 modules. This can contribute to reducing the TCO ^[2] by customers in building and operating data centers.

Following the 96GB product validation, the company is proceeding with the validation process for 128GB product with another customer. This product, equipped with 32Gb DDR5 DRAM using the 1bnm process, or the 5th-gen of the 10-nanometer technology, has high performance/watt ^[3]. The frirm plans to complete the ongoing 128GB validation as soon as possible to establish a CXL product portfolio to support customers in a timely manner.

SK hynix is making efforts to expand the CXL ecosystem along with the development of CXL DRAM. The company developed HMSDK ^[4], software optimized for CMM-DDR5 and integrated it on Linux, the world’s largest open-source OS, in September, improving the performance of CXL applied systems.

“We are developing various solution products to fulfill Optimal Innovation ^[5] in order to overcome the limitation of high cost and scalability of the existing system,” said Uksong Kang, head, Next Gen PP&E. “We will provide optimized value to customers by dramatically improving the scalability and the flexibility of memory while meeting customers’ different needs.”   

⁽¹⁾ Compute eXpress Link (CXL): A next-gen interface that efficiently connects CPU, GPU, memory, and other components in high-performance computing systems to support massive, ultra-fast computation. Based on PCIe interface, CXL allows fast data transfer and has pooling capability to efficiently utilize memory.
⁽²⁾ Total cost of ownership: Total cost of owning a product or service, from purchase to disposal. It also includes costs for deployment, maintenance, operations and upgrades
⁽³⁾ Performance per watt: Indicator of data capacity per second that can be processed per unit of power.
⁽⁴⁾ Heterogeneous Memory S/W Development Kit (HMSDK): SK hynix’s development kit for heterogeneous memory software. It improves performance by expanding bandwidth through efficient crossbar array and rearranging data with appropriate memory device in accordance with data use frequency.
⁽⁵⁾ Optimal Innovation: One of the product orientations unveiled by SK hynix at the SK AI Summit 2024, meaning product innovation optimized for AI era systems such as CXL and PI.