Samsung Electronics and Red Hat Partnership To Lead Expansion of CXL Memory Ecosystem With Key Milestone

SEOUL, Korea – Dec. 27, 2023 –Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully verified Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) memory operations in a real user environment with open-source software provider Red Hat, leading the expansion of its CXL ecosystem. Due to the exponential growth of data throughput and memory requirements for emerging fields like generative AI, autonomous driving and in-memory databases (IMDBs), the demand for systems with greater memory bandwidth and capacity is also increasing. CXL is a unified interface standard that connects various processors, such as CPUs, GPUs and memory devices through a PCIe® interface that can serve as a solution for limitations in existing systems in terms of speed, latency and expandability. “Samsung has been working closely with a wide range of industry partners in areas from software, datacenters and servers to chipset providers, and has been at the forefront of building up the CXL memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “Our CXL partnership with Red Hat is an exemplary case of collaboration between advanced software and hardware, which will enrich and accelerate the CXL ecosystem as a whole.”

In this latest development, Samsung has optimized its CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9.3 and verified memory recognition, read and write operations in Red Hat’s KVM and Podman environments. This allows datacenter clients to easily use Samsung’s CXL memory without having to make additional adjustments to their existing hardware.

“The successful verification of Samsung’s CXL Memory Expander interoperability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is significant because it opens up the applicability of the CXL Memory Expander to IaaS^[1]and PaaS^[2]-based software provided by Red Hat,” said Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific. “This is an important milestone in the integration of hardware and software to build an open-source ecosystem for next-generation memory development.”

Samsung and Red Hat have together published the “RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enabling Guide” ^[3] and “RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Whitepaper” to help users utilize Samsung’s CXL memory on RHEL 9.3 and build high-performance computing systems in various user environments.

The two companies first signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in May, 2022, to collaborate on next-generation memory and will continue their efforts through the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) in developing CXL open-source and reference models. The ongoing partnership covers a range of storage and memory products, including NVMe SSDs, CXL Memory, computational memory/storage and fabrics.

About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Samsung inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, digital appliances, network systems, and memory, system LSI, foundry, and LED solutions. For the latest news, please visit the Samsung Newsroom at news.samsung.com. About Red Hat Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open-source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize their industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open-source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

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_{¹ Infrastructure as a Service. ² Platform as a Service. ³ CXL Memory User Guide and Whitepaper are available for download.}