CXL Specification 1.0 Released: New Industry High-Speed Interconnect From Intel

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With the battleground moving from single core performance to multi-core acceleration, a new war is being fought with how data is moved around between different compute resources. The Interconnect Wars are truly here, and the battleground just got a lot more complicated. We’ve seen NVLink, CCIX, and GenZ come out in recent years as offering the next generation of host-to-device and device-to-device high-speed interconnect, with a variety of different features. Now CXL, or Compute Express Link, is taking to the field.

This new interconnect, for which the version 1.0 specification is being launched today, started in the depths of Intel’s R&D Labs over four years ago, however what was made is being launched as an open standard, headed up by a consortium of nine companies. These companies include Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, HPE, Huawei, Intel, and Microsoft, which as a collective was described as one of the companies as ‘the biggest group of influencers driving a modern interconnect standard’.

In our call, we were told that the specification is actually been in development for a few years at Intel, and was only lifted recently to drive a new consortium around an open cache coherent interconnect standard. The upcoming consortium of the nine founding companies will be incorporated later this year, working under US rules. The consortium states that members will be free to use the IP on any device, and aside from the nine founders, other companies can become contributors and/or adopters, depending on if they want to use the technology or help contribute to the next standard.

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