AI Market: HBM's Dominance Expected to Continue... 'CXL Alternative Just a Storage Supplement'

High-bandwidth memory (HBM), which has established itself as a core technology and bottleneck for artificial intelligence (AI) services, is projected to continue its undisputed dominance moving forward.

During a panel discussion at the "AI Infrastructure Summit" tech conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California on the 16th (local time), engineering experts from Intel and OpenAI expressed skeptical views on Compute Express Link (CXL), which has drawn attention as a technology that could potentially replace HBM.

CXL is a next-generation interconnect standard that more efficiently connects memory with AI accelerators responsible for computation.

Within the semiconductor industry, there had been expectations that the full-scale adoption of CXL would significantly substitute for sky-high HBM and substantially lower the costs of building AI servers.

However, Daniel Morris, a researcher in charge of AI accelerator design at OpenAI, asserted during the panel discussion that "from the perspective of actually running AI models, I cannot find a use case for CXL."

He confessed, "If forced to find a role, it would be around gathering inactive data that is not frequently used in massive models," adding, "Contrary to expectations, I have not seen a use case specialized for actually running models."

Vidya Thiagarajan, general manager of SoC architecture at Intel, also evaluated that "while it is fine to bundle memory with CXL, this is not a replacement for HBM, but merely a level of supplementing auxiliary storage."

She pointed out that "the data speed moving back and forth to graphics processing units (GPUs) via CXL is by no means as fast as HBM."

This implies that no matter how much the connection method is improved, CXL will find it difficult to usurp HBM's position due to bandwidth differences.

Consequently, the monopolistic positions of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which practically dictate the global HBM market, are expected to persist for some time.

(Photo: Provided by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.