CXL Consortium & Gen-Z Consortium Sign Letter of Intent to Advance Interconnect Technology

High performance computing continues to evolve—meeting the ever-increasing demand for high efficiency, low-latency, rapid and seamless processing. The Gen-Z Consortium was founded in 2016 to create a next-generation fabric capable of bridging existing solutions while enabling new, unbounded innovation in an open, non-proprietary standards body.

In 2019, the CXL Consortium launched to deliver Compute Express Link (CXL ), an industry-supported cache-coherent interconnect designed for processors, memory expansion, and accelerators. The CXL Consortium and the Gen-Z Consortium established a joint memorandum of understanding (MOU) providing an opportunity for collaboration to define bridging between the protocols. This took the form of a joint working group that encouraged creativity and innovation between the two organizations toward the betterment of the industry as a whole.

Looking to the future, the CXL Consortium and Gen-Z Consortium have identified synergies between the two consortia that resulted in the signing of a Letter of Intent which, if passed and agreed upon by all parties, would transfer the Gen-Z Specifications and all Gen-Z assets to the CXL Consortium.

The intent of both organizations is to focus industry efforts related to the development of a memory coherent interface under the CXL Consortium with CXL as the sole industry standard moving forward. This shift will help streamline the technology development under a single, laser-focused organization. Member companies will be able to dedicate resources to one industry organization and eliminate the risk of duplicated efforts.

We’re excited about the opportunity to focus the computing industry on a single specification moving forward. We’ve been working together since the inception of the CXL Consortium, and we believe that this is the right step forward for our members and the industry ecosystem.