[HN Gopher] Camel: CXL-based memory disaggregation framework
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       Camel: CXL-based memory disaggregation framework
        
       Author : blopeur
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2022-03-16 14:52 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.kaist.ac.kr)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.kaist.ac.kr)
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | Worth clicking for just the image of the memory-board they've
       | built. Unlike most pcb's, it's stark & open, hardly a passive
       | component on it. Really wild to see so much open boardspace. They
       | have 8 dimms here. I suspect it's basically just an FPGA acting
       | as a CXL memory controller, but perhaps there's more.
       | 
       | They compare themselves versus RDMA over Infiniband (56Gbps)
       | which makes sense as it's the competitor. It's not clear to me
       | whether they are using their CXL switch in their tests, or
       | whether the CXL memory is directly attached; I'd be curious to
       | know what the performance hit is for switching. But the idea of
       | massive fan out memory is definitely compelling!
       | 
       | Medium term, I imagine we'll be seeing variants of stuff like
       | this with HBM stacks onboard. See the recent UCIe chiplets
       | alliance[1], with AMD, Intel, TSMC, Samsung, others. To tie it
       | back to my first comment, this would just be a modest modern
       | microminaturization of this wide open sparsely-populated huge
       | PCB... just put this whole thing on chip. It'd make a very large
       | (capacity), very small (footprint) memory module.
       | 
       | It's unsurprising that this company is claiming some patents over
       | this technology even in the press brief. Hopefully the core ideas
       | of CXL are allowed to germinate & grow, without the ecosystem
       | immediately becoming IP overencumbered.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.servethehome.com/universal-chiplet-
       | interconnect-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30538809
       | (92 points, 12 days, 26 comments)
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-18 23:02 UTC)