Marvell acquired Tanzanite, a startup focused on high-speed interconnect technology.

Marvell Technology has announced its intent to acquire Tanzanite, a compute express link (CXL) startup, in an all-cash deal expected to close during Marvell's second fiscal quarter of 2022. Founded in 2020, Tanzanite was an early player in the emerging CXL marketplace, specializing in memory expansion, tiered memory, and memory pooling technologies. At the heart of these developments was Tanzanite's smart-logic interface connector, which enables memory to be pooled across compute servers at low latencies using CXL, an open-standard interconnect introduced in 2019 that has garnered support from more than 190 vendors, including Intel, AMD, IBM, and Nvidia.

Marvell's primary interest in Tanzanite centers on memory pooling, in which a microprocessor in one server can access memory resources in another across a PCIe fabric. Today, memory-intensive workloads like AI/ML, analytics, and search often require large multi-socket servers to achieve the desired memory density. As Thad Omura, VP of marketing for Marvell's flash business unit, explained to The Register: "If you don't need all the additional compute, it's an ineffective and really expensive way to expand your memory footprint." While it has been possible to compose CPU compute and storage for years, "memory is kind of the last frontier," Omura said. Tanzanite demonstrated this capability as a proof of concept in March, enabling multiple processors to access a pool of 80TB of memory at latencies it claimed were lower than could be achieved in a dual-socket server.

Marvell envisions a future in which CPU/GPU compute, memory, and storage resources will be disaggregated into individual boxes and then composed on the fly, with CXL playing a pivotal role in achieving this goal. "Fully composable, higher-bandwidth, and near-memory compute is what everyone is trying to get to, and this is a pathway of intellectual property that's going to help Marvell get there," Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founder of Futurum Research, told The Register. Marvell plans to integrate CXL accelerators into a wide swath of its product portfolio, including data processing units and storage systems. "If you think about all of those different product types that CXL is going to touch, we believe Marvell is in the best position to do that," Omura explained.

While Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable and AMD's upcoming Genoa and Bergamo Epyc gen-4 processors will mark CXL's arrival on mainstream platforms, the technology remains in its infancy and faces significant challenges. One of the biggest hurdles is extending CXL's benefits beyond the server chassis—a requirement for composable infrastructure. Server-to-server communications have traditionally been done over Ethernet, though this approach is impractical at memory speeds. "Conversion of CXL to Ethernet and then back into memory may, from our perspective, impose too much latency," Omura stated. "When you start looking at pooling of memory, it'll be important that you keep latency end-to-end to a minimum." One potential solution Marvell is exploring involves a blade-server style backplane. Newman noted, "If they can solve this, they are going to add a whole lot of value by bringing memory and compute almost seamlessly together without latency." Omura acknowledged that realizing Marvell's composable infrastructure ambitions will require time, observing: "This is not an overnight type of thing, but the industry has identified a standard way to go after solving this complete infrastructure composability issue."