The CXL Consortium, an industry standards body dedicated to advancing Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, today announced the release of the CXL 2.0 specification. CXL is an open industry-standard interconnect offering coherency and memory semantics using high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between host processor and devices such as accelerators, memory buffers, and smart I/O devices. The CXL 2.0 specification adds support for switching for fan-out to connect to more devices; memory pooling for increased memory utilization efficiency and providing memory capacity on demand; and support for persistent memory - all while preserving industry investments by supporting full backwards compatibility with CXL 1.1 and 1.0.

"Datacenter architectures continue to evolve rapidly to support the growing demands of emerging workloads for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with CXL technology keeping pace to meet the performance and latency demands," said Barry McAuliffe, president, CXL Consortium. "Designed with breakthrough performance and easy adoption as guiding principles, the CXL 2.0 specification is a significant achievement from our dedicated technical work group members."