Marvell Technology of the United States Releases Second-Generation Memory Expander, Supporting Up to 9TB

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On October 12, Marvell Technology of the United States announced the launch of its second-generation Structera X 3406 and 3506 memory expansion controllers, targeting artificial intelligence inference, cloud computing, and large data center applications. The company said the series is the industry's first six-channel CXL 3.2 memory expander, with a single controller supporting up to 9TB of DDR4 or 6TB of DDR5 memory, a 50% increase in the number of memory channels compared with the previous generation, and samples are expected to be shipped to customers starting in the first quarter of 2027.

The two controllers use different memory configurations. Among them, the Structera X 3406 is equipped with six DDR4 memory channels and supports up to 18 DDR4 RDIMM slots; the Structera X 3506 is equipped with six DDR5 memory channels and supports up to 12 DDR5 RDIMM slots. The new products support PCIe 6.0 x16 connectivity, with host-side bandwidth of up to 256GB/s, and allow up to four hosts to share memory capacity.

The new-generation products integrate LZ4 inline compression technology, with compression and decompression throughput reaching up to 250GB/s, 5 times that of the previous generation. Marvell Technology test data shows that, depending on the application workload, this technology can provide 2 to 3 times the effective memory capacity of the original capacity. Under deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) workloads, the query processing capability per second of a single controller can be increased by up to 2 times that of the previous generation, and the effective capacity of the Embedding Table can reach 2 to 3 times the original.

For large language model inference applications, performance data released by Marvell Technology shows that under the same context length conditions, the second-generation Structera X can shorten the time to first token by 40% to 50%; under the same latency conditions, the supported context window length can be expanded by up to 2 times that of the previous generation.

Reliability and security configurations include StructGuard enterprise-level reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) technology, as well as error correction mechanisms for DRAM device failures. The products also integrate post-quantum cryptography technology, Caliptra 2.0, CXL IDE, and AES-256 memory encryption functions for memory access and data transmission protection.

Marvell Technology has carried out CXL memory technology cooperation with Alibaba, Samsung Electronics, and SK hynix. Among them, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix participated in compatibility verification between Structera products and DRAM memory, while Alibaba cooperated with Marvell Technology to develop memory architecture for AI data centers. The previous-generation Structera X 2404 and 2504 have already been supplied to hyperscale data center customers, and the new products will continue the related software architecture and ecosystem integration.