How Astera Labs’ PCIe and CXL Products Enhance the Capabilities of 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

CALIFORNIA: Astera Labs, the leading provider of semiconductor-based connectivity solutions for cloud and AI infrastructure, today revealed its partnership with Intel to deliver its PCIe® and CXL® solutions that optimize the performance of 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Astera Labs has performed extensive interoperability testing in its Cloud-Scale Interop Lab to help hyperscalers and OEMs reduce design risks, speed up time-to-market, and deploy Intel-based platforms with trust at cloud-scale.

Today’s workloads require more compute and memory bandwidth. 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with more cores and integrated accelerators offer extra memory bandwidth and capacity. Astera Labs’ Leo CXL Smart Memory Controllers enhance this, boosting the available memory capability.

Leo enables fine-grained heterogeneous interleaving of native CPU, DRAM, and CXL-attached memory and demonstrates significant performance gains for memory-intensive applications. Leo has passed intensive feature validation, comprehensive interop testing, and rigorous application-level testing by Astera Labs to enable cloud-scale deployment.

Astera Labs’ Aries PCIe/CXL Smart DSP Retimers are the most popular retimers for cloud and AI infrastructure today. As server density grows and larger disaggregated architectures are implemented, connectivity among processors, accelerators, network interface cards, switches and other PCIe 5.0 or CXL devices becomes more difficult.

Aries improves PCIe 5.0 reach by 3x, enabling compute and AI clusters to be implemented for Generative AI training workloads. Designed for cloud and AI, Aries also features a low latency mode to ensure CXL solutions such as Leo provide the best performance for latency-sensitive applications.

In its Cloud-Scale Interop Lab, Astera Labs thoroughly tests its portfolio for standards compliance and system-level interoperation with all major hosts, endpoints, and memory modules. This testing allows plug-and-play interoperability for deploying cloud and AI infrastructure at scale.

Sanjay Gajendra, President and Chief Operating Officer, Astera Labs, said, “We value our strategic collaboration with Intel as we work together to deliver performant and reliable PCIe and CXL solutions for our mutual customers and we continue to innovate and meet the needs of future data centers. Our Leo memory controllers and Aries retimers, combined with 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, deliver the right recipe for unprecedented scale in modern day data centers.”

Lisa Spelman, CVP, Xeon Products & Solutions, Intel, said, “With support for CXL, 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors deliver enhanced performance for memory intensive workloads. The addition of a technology like Astera Labs’ Leo CXL Smart Memory Controller enables system configurations right-sized to meet customer demand. We look forward to continued collaboration to bring CXL based memory solutions to market.”

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