Hot Chips 2026: XCENA and Samsung’s Near-Memory Compute CXL Device

Memory expansion has been attractive for years, and is more relevant than ever because ML models have an insatiable appetite for memory capacity. In response, XCENA has worked with Samsung to create a CXL memory expansion device that can also host SSDs and do compute. The device is called MX1, where MX stands for “Memory Xcelerator”.On the memory expansion front, the MX1 can host up to 2 TB of DDR5 memory and connects to the host via a PCIe 6/CXL 3.2 x8 interface. The MX1 therefore has 128 GB/s of bandwidth to the host, or 64 GB/s in each direction. XCENA exposes another eight downstream PCIe 6 lanes that can be used to connect SSDs. SSD storage can be exposed as memory, with the MX1’s attached DRAM acting as a cache. The combination of DDR5 slots and downstream PCIe lanes lets the MX1 make a massive amount of memory capacity visible to the host. However, MX1’s most exciting feature is arguably a substantial amount of onboard compute.MX1’s chip hosts 3072 RISC-V cores, divided into…