Marvell agreed to acquire privately-held Tanzanite Silicon Solutions, a start-up based in Milpitas, California that is developing advanced Compute Express Link (CXL) technologies. Terms of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed.
Marvell said the future cloud data center will be built on fully disaggregated architecture utilizing CXL technology, requiring greater high-speed interconnectivity than ever combined with optimized compute, networking, memory, security and storage chipset solutions. Tanzanite has developed extensive expertise in CXL technology that will help further accelerate Marvell’s vision of fully composable cloud infrastructure. The benefits of CXL include infrastructure agility to instantly allocate resources tailored to workload requirements. The acquisition expands its CXL development initiatives.
In March, Tanzanite unveiled its architectural vision and product roadmap with an SoC mapped to FPGA Proof-Of-Concept vehicle demonstrating Memory Expansion and Memory Pooling, with multi-host CXL based connectivity.
The architecture and “Smart Logic Interface Connector” SoC enables independent scaling and sharing of memory and compute in a pool with low latency within and across server racks. The Tanzanite solution provides a highly scalable architecture for exa-scale level memory capacity and compute acceleration, supporting multiple industry standard form-factors, ranging from E1.S, E3.S, memory expansion board, and memory appliance.
Tanzanite’s scalable, low latency CXL optimized fabric with caching, advanced security and RAS targets use cases:
- Advanced Memory Expansion with optional persistency support
- Memory Pooling and Tiering
- CXL Switch
- Near Memory Compute
The first generation TanzanoidTZ tiered memory appliance enables multiple CPUs to access up to 80 TB of memory capacity with 16 DDR5/32 DDR4 channel equivalent bandwidth per host, with latencies lower than dual socket servers.
“We believe that CXL will be a significant game-changer in enabling optimal resource utilization in next generation data centers, and the acquisition of Tanzanite advances our abilities to address our customers’ most challenging issues,” said Dan Christman, executive vice president, Storage Products Group, Marvell. “Marvell’s investment underscores our commitment to deliver on the promise of CXL across our industry-leading cloud portfolio spanning compute, electro-optics, networking, security and storage.”
“We are excited to see our vision for CXL leadership take a leap forward as part of Marvell, a company that is renowned for its customer-focused innovation,” said Shalesh Thusoo, CEO, Tanzanite. “CXL technologies offer a unique value proposition for a multitude of use cases and are helping shape the next generation composable data center. I’d like to thank our industry partners for their unwavering support and the entire Tanzanite team for their dedication and commitment in pioneering this technology and enabling us to achieve this milestone today.”
“The CXL standard will play a significant role in helping the industry deliver fully composable infrastructure for the cloud,” said Noam Mizrahi, corporate chief technology officer, Marvell. “The integration of CXL across our end-to-end, cloud-optimized silicon portfolio will bring new levels of data center efficiency, scalability and flexibility to power emerging metaverse and next generation AI applications.”
Marvell’s portfolio of cloud offerings includes high-speed Alaska active electrical cable (AEC) PAM4 DSPs and Ethernet PHYs; Bravera SSD and HDD controllers; Inphi PAM4 electro-optics; COLORZ data center interconnects (DCIs); OCTEON data processor units (DPUs) for security, offload, and acceleration; Teralynx Ethernet switches; custom Arm-based server CPUs; and full custom ASICs.
