[News] Kioxia Reportedly to Sample CXL Modules Soon, Reaffirms Strong NVIDIA CMX Ties

As AI workloads demand ever more memory, DRAM’s physical capacity ceiling is becoming the bottleneck. At a September 3rd briefing, Japan’s NAND giant detailed how its CXL memory modules expand usable memory capacity while cutting latency by over 90% versus conventional approaches, per EE Times Japan.

According to EE Times Japan, Kioxia plans to begin CXL memory module sampling soon.

Citing Katsuki Matsudera, head of Memory Application Technology at Kioxia’s Memory Division, the report further notes that simulations showed that replacing one-third of DRAM with CXL memory modules would keep performance degradation to less than 5%. Alternatively, replacing part of DRAM with CXL memory modules at the same cost could double capacity while boosting performance by 1.3x, the report adds.

How CXL Closes the Gap

As the report notes, AI is driving strong DRAM demand, but DRAM’s limited capacity makes it difficult to scale memory within increasingly data-hungry systems. NAND flash offers far greater capacity, yet comes with its own trade-offs: higher latency and lower write endurance make it unsuitable as a direct replacement for DRAM in main memory.

According to Matsudera, real-world access patterns follow an 80/20 split: roughly 80% of memory accesses hit just 20% of the data, while the rest is accessed far less often. Kioxia’s approach exploits that gap — storing the 80% on flash memory that, like DRAM, can be accessed directly as memory, easing capacity constraints without sacrificing performance.

But flash’s inherent latency remained a hurdle. To close that gap, Kioxia developed a dedicated controller with latency-reduction features. Paired with XL-FLASH, the resulting CXL memory module cuts latency by more than 90% compared with conventional approaches, per EE Times Japan.

Beyond CXL, Kioxia also used the briefing to update its flagship BiCS Flash roadmap. The company began mass production of its 10th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory at its Kitakami Plant in Iwate starting in July, while also shipping samples of its 1Tb TLC products. Compared with the 8th generation, the new generation delivers a 59% increase in bit density, a 40% improvement in read power efficiency, and a 30% improvement in write power efficiency, per EE Times Japan.

CMX Collaboration with NVIDIA in Focus

Notably, BigGo Finance also highlights Kioxia’s reported collaboration with NVIDIA around CMX (Context Memory Storage) — a new storage tier NVIDIA announced in March, built around its BlueField-4 data processing unit to expand GPU memory for long-context conversational and agentic AI inference.

That collaboration is already bearing fruit: Kioxia unveiled the CM10 Series in July, its latest enterprise SSDs powered by 10th-generation BiCS FLASH TLC and built to support the NVIDIA CMX architecture, delivering major gains in performance and power efficiency over the previous generation.

As Kioxia’s first PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSD, the CM10 Series also supports direct-cold-plate liquid cooling, offering greater flexibility and efficiency for cooling next-generation AI infrastructure, the report adds.

According to the report, Makoto Hamada, General Manager of the SSD Business Division’s Technology Planning Department, noted that the competition is inevitable given the market’s huge potential, but said Kioxia remains closely engaged with NVIDIA and regularly communicates with key executives. “I don’t feel we are falling behind,” he said, adding that Kioxia is also watching emerging storage needs in AI PCs and physical AI, the report suggests.

As SeDaily points out, Samsung could be another key player in the market, as the South Korean memory giant is reportedly accelerating its V9 NAND capacity expansion, driven in part by NVIDIA’s next-generation storage architecture, CMX, slated for launch in the second half of the year.

According to SeDaily, NVIDIA’s CMX packs 576 SSDs for 9,600TB of total capacity, while NAND demand for the architecture is projected to surge from 35 million TB this year to more than 100 million TB next year. With Samsung’s NAND output expected to reach around 250 million TB this year, the company is positioning its massive production capacity to capture a larger share of the emerging CMX market, the report adds.

Read more

• [News] NVIDIA Vera Rubin Spillover from HBM to NAND: CMX Fuels TLC Spot Price Rebound from June Dip
• [News] Kioxia Steps Up AI NAND Competition With South Korean Rivals, Eyes PCIe 6.0 and UFS 5.0 Mass Production

(Photo credit: Kioxia’s LinkedIn)