A live product demonstration of CXL over fiber garnered a lot of attention at SC23. Other popular demos included a 224 Gbps PAM4 solution, and a proof-of-concept 128 GT/s (PCIe® 7.0) high-speed cable system.
CXL is based on the PCI Express specification physical and electrical interface. CXL enables cache coherency between the CPU and attached devices, such as accelerators, GPUs, or memory devices.
Emerging storage and memory use cases demand high performance, low latency, and coherency. Rack scale connectivity will define next-generation architectures, and CXL is the breakthrough CPU-to-device interconnect.
Samtec’s new CXL over optics proof of concept demonstrates these possibilities. In this video, Giri Tumu, Samtec Optics Application Engineer, gives a brief overview of the system.
In the demo, an AMD Genoa platform hosts a Samtec FireFly™ add-in card. On the endpoint, another Samtec add-in card communicates with NVMe and a Rambus CXL endpoint.
The host and the endpoint are separated by 100 meters of OM4 multi-mode optical fiber.
A Samtec PCUO FireFly is the focal interconnect on both add-in cards. PCUO is a PCIe-over-fiber active optical cable assembly available in x4, x8, and x16 configurations. It meets PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 specifications.
PCIe 5.0 options are under development.
Here’s a list of other articles that may be of interest:
- PCIe 6.0 Data Routed From New Chip-Adjacent Connector To Front Panel
- PCI Express: Is 85 Ohms Really Needed?
- New PCIe® Gen 4.0 With Surprise Hot Add Capability
- An Optical Illusion? Maximum Signal Density and Design Flexibility
- Why Did PCIe 6.0 Adopt PAM4? There Are Many Reasons.
If you’d like more information on Samtec fiber optic cable systems, or to learn more about this demonstration, email our technical experts at [email protected].
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