The new Marvell Structera CXL family includes both CXL Type-3 Memory expansion devices with a few exciting twists. What makes the family more intriguing is that the company has another version, called a near-memory accelerator with up to 16 Arm Neoverse V2 cores onboard. I open very few briefing decks where I immediately get excited. On the way back from the Olympics, I opened this announcement half asleep and felt that sense of excitement. Let us get into it.
The two sides of the family currently are the Structera A and Stuctera X. The A feels like it is for accelerators and the X is for memory eXpansion.
Let us start with the coolest one first. The Marvell Structera A 2504 is, at its heart, a CXL 2.0 memory expansion device, but with a huge twist. First, it can support up to four channels, not just two. Next, it has 16x Arm Neoverse V2 cores. Those are the same cores as NVIDIA Grace uses, so these are not low-power and low-performance cores.
Marvell also has built-in LZ4 compression and decompression to maximize the capacity of the memory, which can be up to DDR5-6400.