Marvell's new chip compresses data to solve AI memory problems

Marvell has launched new Structera CXL controllers that use inline compression to reduce memory and bandwidth pressure in AI workloads. This technology compresses data in real time when writing to DRAM and decompresses when reading, without requiring any changes to apps.

Structera X is a CXL memory expansion controller supporting DDR5 and DDR4, with four ARM Cortex-M7 cores and up to 200 GB/s memory bandwidth, handling over 6TB of DDR5 memory. Structera A targets near-memory acceleration, with 16 Arm Neoverse V2 cores, 64 MB of cache, and four DDR channels.

Both controllers include a dedicated CDB compression-decompression module using a custom LZ4 lossless algorithm. In tests with real mixed data, compression performance matched host-side LZ4, achieving 2.75x for XML and 3.64x for database data.