Inventec 96 DIMM CXL Expansion Box at OCP Summit 2024 for TBs of Memory

This is it. For more than a decade and a half at STH, I have been hearing server companies talk about disaggregated memory and having storage, memory, and compute shelves. Inventec and Astera Labs have made that possible with a 96x DDR5 DIMM memory shelf. Using CXL x16 connections, it can connect to an upcoming 8-way Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids-SP server that itself has 128x DDR DIMM slots for a whopping 224 DIMM slots in a single scale-up server. We are about to get tens of TBs of memory in a single server, which is huge for scale-up server applications.

On the front of the server, we have 24 CDFP ports. Each carries a PCIe Gen5 x16 connection between the CXL box and the host server or servers.

CXL makes this all happen. We have a lot on CXL and how it allows one to re-purpose the physical layer of PCIe lanes and add memory to a system with Type-3 devices.

While one option with a memory shelf like that is to attach it to multiple systems, Inventec showed something cooler. This is an 8-way Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids-SP” system. Granite Rapids-SP is the P-core Xeon 6 that has 8 memory channels and can scale to these 8 CPU system topologies.

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