The CXL Consortium, an industry standards body dedicated to advancing Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, today announced the release of the CXL 3.0 specification. The CXL 3.0 specification expands on previous technology generations to increase scalability and to optimize system level flows with advanced switching and fabric capabilities, efficient peer-to-peer communications, and fine-grained resource sharing across multiple compute domains.

"Modern datacenters require heterogenous and composable architectures to support compute intensive workloads for applications such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - and we continue to evolve CXL technology to meet industry requirements," said Siamak Tavallaei, president, CXL Consortium. "Developed by our dedicated technical workgroup members, the CXL 3.0 specification will enable new usage models in composable disaggregated infrastructure."Highlights of the CXL 3.0 specification:

• Fabric capabilities
• Multi-headed and Fabric Attached Devices
• Enhanced Fabric Management
• Composable disaggregated infrastructure
• Better scalability and improved resource utilization
• Enhanced memory pooling
• Multi-level switching
• New enhanced coherency capabilities
• Improved software capabilities
• Doubles the bandwidth to 64GTs
• Zero added latency over CXL 2.0
• Full backward compatibility with CXL 2.0, CXL 1.1, and CXL 1.0

"CXL 3.0 is a significant step forward in enabling heterogeneous computing," said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst, TIRIAS Research. "With its expanded features for coherent memory sharing and new fabric capabilities, CXL 3.0 adds new levels of flexibility and composability required by present day and future data centers. The CXL Consortium has made exceptionally fast progress in delivering this important spec to the industry."