Micron Technology is now sampling its new CZ120 CXL memory expansion modules in 128GB and 256GB capacities in the E3.S 2T form factor, which uses PCIe Gen5 x8 interface.
The CZ120 modules are capable of running up to 36GB/s memory read/write bandwidth and augment standard server systems when incremental memory capacity and bandwidth is required. The CZ120 modules use Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) standards and fully support the CXL 2.0 Type 3 standard.
Micron says that by leveraging a unique dual-channel memory architecture and its high-volume production DRAM process, the Micron CZ120 delivers higher module capacity and increased bandwidth. Workloads that benefit from more memory capacity include AI training and inference models, SaaS applications, in-memory databases, high-performance computing and general-purpose compute workloads that run on a hypervisor on premise or in the cloud.
“Micron is advancing the adoption of CXL memory with this CZ120 sampling milestone to key customers,” commented Siva Makineni, vice president of the Micron Advanced Memory Systems Group. “We have been developing and testing our CZ120 memory expansion modules utilizing both Intel and AMD platforms capable of supporting the CXL standard. Our product innovation coupled with our collaborative efforts with the CXL ecosystem will enable faster acceptance of this new standard, as we work collectively to meet the ever-growing demands of data centers and their memory-intensive workloads.”
“To accelerate the industry initiative to establish and expand the CXL ecosystem, Intel is collaborating with Micron to test and evaluate their CZ120 memory expansion module on our 4th generation Xeon Scalable processors and Xeon platforms,” said Jim Pappas, director of Technology Initiatives at Intel.
“AMD and Micron have had a long and successful history of collaboration. Since the introduction of our EPYC™ processors, we have validated Micron memory on multiple platforms powered by AMD EPYC processors. With the introduction of the CXL standard, we have extended our joint efforts to include the Micron CZ120 memory expansion module. We’ve recently tested our AMD EPYC 9754 processor with the CZ120 modules and are seeing impressive results in TPC-H benchmark performance compared to DRAM only,” said Mahesh Wagh, senior fellow of Server Systems Architecture at AMD.
