SANTA CLARA, CA, U.S. – September 19, 2023 – Astera Labs today said its Leo Memory Connectivity Platform is the industry’s first Compute Express Link (CXL) memory controller that increases server memory bandwidth by 50 percent while decreasing latency by 25 percent when integrated with the forthcoming 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processor.
The company said that through new hardware-based interleaving of CXL-attached and CPU native memory, Astera Labs and Intel eliminate application-level software changes to augment server memory resources via CXL. Existing applications can “plug-and-play” to take advantage of the highest possible memory bandwidth and capacity in the system.
“The growth of computing cores and performance has historically outpaced memory throughput advancements, resulting in degraded server performance efficiency over time,” said Sanjay Gajendra, COO of Astera Labs. “This performance scaling challenge has led to the infamous ‘memory wall,’ and thanks to our collaboration with Intel, our Leo Memory Connectivity Platform breaks through this barrier by delivering on the promise of PCIe 5.0 and CXL memory.”
Data center infrastructure scaling limitations due to the memory wall are none more evident than in AI servers where memory bandwidth and capacity bottlenecks result in inefficient processor utilization. The CXL innovations delivered by Astera Labs and Intel directly address these bottlenecks and lay the foundation for cloud, hybrid-cloud and enterprise data centers to maximize accelerated computing performance.
Along with Leo, Astera Labs also driving interoperability with its Aries PCIe 5.0 / CXL 2.0 Smart Retimers on Intel server platforms, designed to deliver a low-latency CXL mode that complements Leo to form a robust CXL memory connectivity solution, the company said.
“We applaud Astera Labs for their contributions to the CXL ecosystem and are delighted to extend our ongoing collaboration. We believe Memory Connectivity Platforms containing innovations from companies like Astera Labs will help deliver enhanced performance on next generation Intel Xeon processors, and accelerate a myriad of memory intensive workloads,” said Zane Ball, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Platform Engineering and Architecture Group, Intel.
Astera Labs will showcase Leo and Aries together with Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable processors at Booth #210, September 19-20 at the San Jose Convention Center.
