[Chip Talk] Gaehwa Stalled by Intel... Samsung Eagerly Awaiting the CXL Market

Complementing and Replacing HBM: Next-Generation Memory Technology
Capable of Handling Data for Generative AI
Commercialization Delayed Due to Intel's Financial Crisis
Market Outlook Remains Bright Despite Setbacks
Samsung Continues Investments Over the Past Decade
SK Hynix Also Preparing for Upcoming Competition

Compute Express Link (CXL), recognized as the 'next-generation memory' and 'next High Bandwidth Memory (HBM),' is drawing significant attention from the industry as it is expected to officially open the market this year. The emergence of the CXL market is also seen as a critical turning point for Samsung Electronics, which aims to overcome the semiconductor industry's challenges, further increasing its prominence.

Samsung Electronics CXL Products Yonhap News

According to the semiconductor industry on the 20th, Samsung Electronics is currently focusing on developing the 6th generation HBM, HBM4, while continuously strengthening its efforts in CXL. It is reported that Samsung has completed all preparations to secure a leading position once customer demand for CXL materializes and the market fully opens.

CXL is a memory technology expected to complement and potentially replace the shortcomings of HBM in the future. Its functions and roles are similar to HBM, such as enhancing the performance of memory required for computation. However, CXL is more efficient and cost-effective. While HBM stacks multiple DRAM chips vertically to increase bandwidth and accelerate computation speed, CXL expands memory capacity simply by adding modules, thereby speeding up computation. It has the advantage of consolidating CPU, GPU, and memory semiconductors required for data processing in one place and is evaluated as capable of handling the large volumes of data needed for recently developed generative artificial intelligence (AI). Experts describe CXL as "a technology that significantly expands the road connecting the brain-like CPU and memory semiconductors from a single lane to ten lanes."

Delayed Emergence Due to Intel's Crisis

CXL is already considered technologically advanced enough for commercialization. At the end of last year, Intel and AMD successively released server CPUs applying CXL 2.0, raising expectations that competition in the CXL market would intensify, but this did not materialize.

The delay in the market's full-scale emergence is analyzed by the industry as being due to the influence of Intel, which is undergoing a financial crisis. Although Intel leads in CXL technology, the company is facing significant difficulties in its core businesses such as foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing), making it challenging to make large-scale investments and open the market aggressively for CXL. This is seen as causing Intel to lose the momentum to actively enter the CXL market. Other companies have also been preparing for CXL technology but have not yet taken the lead to open the market due to high risks. It remains unclear how much demand there will be for CXL in the market, and it is difficult to say that CXL has secured enough influence to surpass HBM.

Nevertheless, the outlook for the CXL market remains bright. Global market research firm Yole Intelligence predicted that the CXL market, which was valued at $1.7 million (approximately 2.2 billion KRW) in 2022, will grow to about $15 billion (approximately 20 trillion KRW) by 2028. Specifically, the share of CXL 2.0 for server CPUs is expected to expand to 42% this year, an increase of about 31 percentage points from 11% last year. It also added that by 2026, the share of server CPUs based on CXL 3.0 will reach 56%, surpassing the CXL 2.0 generation (41%).

Samsung, Investing Over 10 Years, May Reap Rewards

Samsung Electronics is reported to have invested heavily in CXL for about 10 years. During this process, it has also achieved visible results. In 2019, it formed a CXL consortium with Nvidia, AMD, and others, and in May 2022, it developed the world's first CXL DRAM based on version 1.1. Last year, Samsung released a 128GB CXL DRAM supporting version 2.0. There are also reports that Samsung will soon mass-produce the 256GB module CMM-D based on CXL 2.0. Some analysts suggest that the possibility of changing the market atmosphere by preempting CXL is higher than regaining technological competitiveness in the memory market with HBM4, based on these developments.

SK Hynix, which emerged as a strong player in the memory industry by dominating the HBM market, is also preparing for the upcoming competition by developing CXL. Recently, it announced that it has integrated the key functions of its self-developed CXL memory operation optimization software, 'HMSDK,' into Linux, the world's largest open-source operating system. HMSDK allocates memory differentially according to the bandwidth between existing memory and extended CXL memory, expanding the bandwidth of the memory package by more than 30% without adjusting existing applications. Additionally, this software improves performance by more than 12% compared to existing systems through an 'access frequency-based optimization' feature that moves frequently used data to faster memory.