CXL Spec Grows, Absorbs Others to Collate Ecosystem

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.

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