A few weeks ago, we covered the Marvell Structera CXL Memory with Arm Neoverse V2 announcement. That was not scheduled to go-live that day, but it was such an exciting announcement, we had to cover it. Last week, George spotted Marvell Structera A boards at FMS 2024, but we are a bit skeptical of what we saw.
Update: Marvell confirmed to STH that the boards shown were actually the Structera X 2404.
Marvell Structera A CXL Expansion Displayed at FMS 2024
As a quick refresher, Structera A is the CXL memory expansion with 16 Arm Neoverse V2 cores, while Structera B is the memory expansion device without cores. Of course, you can check the article linked above for more details and block diagrams.
Here is the board shown at FMS2024. We are just going to note that we asked at the booth and were told this is Structera A with Arm cores. However, it somewhat does not make sense if you look at this. This chip has twelve DIMMs flanking the main heatsink. That is 3 DPC on a 4-channel controller.
The Marvell Structera A and X 2504 is supposed to be a 4-channel DDR5 2 DPC design, with Structera A 2504 being a 100W TDP part.
Here is the bottom of the board.
Here is the connector side.
There was also one shown as Structera X. We were told this is the 2504, but it appears to be the 2404 again with 12 DIMMs.
Here is the bottom, which appears as one off sequentially from the top board.
We also get a similar heatsink and connector.
Assuming that is what we saw, this is cool. It is a CXL 2.0 DDR4 memory expander. You can put up to 12 DIMMs on this board and add more memory to a system.
For those needing massive RAM in servers, imagine even four of these adding memory capacity and bandwidth to servers. The best part, it allows for recycling DDR4 memory from aging servers to achieve that extra capacity.
Final Words
If you look at the boards shown, however, something will become quickly apparent. These boards are meant to be placed in a chassis rather than some of the E3.S CXL modules we have seen from other memory vendors like Samsung. Likewise, Marvell seems to have more memory channels per device than the Astera Labs Leo we used in our Intel Xeon 6 6700E Sierra Forest launch piece. This technology is very exciting to say the least. Hopefully, we can get hands-on experience with it one of these days beyond just looking at the static boards.
Of course, you can also check out our Marvell Teralynx 10 64-port 800GbE video as another one of Marvell’s cool 5nm product lines here:
