Intel has recently collaborated with leading companies to develop its newest projects. First, the company partnered with Samsung to build the industry’s first DRAM supporting Compute Express Link (CXL) 2.0. Second, it tied up with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to develop enterprise-grade and secure generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Here’s the news scoop.
CXL 2.0 DRAM
On Friday, Samsung announced it is working closely with Intel to develop the industry’s first CXL 2.0 memory. Its collaboration with Intel is bound to ensure optimal support for its Xeon platform.
Jim Pappas, director of Technology Initiatives at Intel, said, “Intel is delighted to work with Samsung on their investment towards a vibrant CXL ecosystem. Intel will continue to work with Samsung to foster the growth and adoption of innovative CXL products throughout the industry.”
The new project of these two companies is a 128GB CXL 2.0 DRAM module that supports the PCIe 5.0 interface with x8 lanes. This amounts to a total bandwidth of 35GB/s, slower than direct-attached system memory. However, with CXL 2.0, it can support memory switching and pooling, allowing several hosts to connect and allocate memory dynamically from the shared resources as needed. This offers data centers more efficiency and flexibility when computing resources.
“As a member of the CXL Consortium Board of Directors, Samsung Electronics remains at the forefront of CXL technology. This breakthrough development underlines our commitment to expanding the CXL ecosystem even further through partnerships with data center, server and chipset companies across the industry,” Samsung’s vice president of New Business Planning Team, Jangseok Choi, said.
CXL is an open standard for connecting different types of memory to the CPU and is leveraged primarily for high-performance data center computing. Based on PCIe 5.0, CXL is optimized for high-bandwidth and low-latency communication in heterogeneous computing environments.
The South Korean manufacturing conglomerate will start mass-producing the CXL 2.0 DRAM later this year.
GenAI solution
Intel is entering into more partnerships. Last Thursday, the company, together with BCG, announced a strategic collaboration to enable GenAI with the use of end-to-end AI hardware and software from AI. This solution seeks to deliver fully custom and proprietary solutions to clients in the enterprise world while ensuring private data are still secure.
Intel’s executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group, Sandra Rivera, spoke about the tie-up. She said, “Generative AI requires a truly democratized approach that enables more secure and scalable choice so enterprises can safely benefit from the technology. Our collaboration with BCG allows us to help customers build generative AI applications that require technology optimized across the entire stack completely inside their chosen security perimeter.”
BCG leveraged the AI supercomputer from Intel, which AI-optimized Habana® Gaudi® hardware accelerators, Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, and production-ready hybrid cloud-scale software power. This AI supercomputer powers BCG’s GenAI model, and delivers insights based on more than five decades of proprietary and highly confidential data.
BCG is a United States-based global management consulting firm since the 1960s. It is among the Big Three, together with Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company.
