XConn Technologies is on a mission to accelerate composable memory innovation to lower the energy consumption and cost of next-generation AI processing. This will mean that data centers around the world can facilitate new AI workloads without draining our fragile global environment. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Krishna Mallampati, XConn’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing.
Krishna Mallampati’s Background
What is Mallampati’s background? Mallampati said:
“I’ve been working in product management, product marketing and sales roles in the interconnect industry for more than 20 years. I have been in the interconnect industry since the beginning, starting with PCIe Gen 1 and have worked in this industry ever since. That’s close to 20 years, with PCIe Gen 6 on the horizon. My time has included product leadership roles with PLX Technology (acquired by Avago), PMC-Sierra (acquired by Microsemi, which in turn was acquired by Microchip technology), and now XConn Technologies.”
“One thing that has remained consistent throughout my years in the industry is how innovation can transform the market. This is the moment where we are today with XConn. We are seeing a new interconnect technology, Compute Express Link (CXL), truly transforming what is possible for compute-intensive applications. The CXL specification offers unprecedented memory capacity and bandwidth so that critical applications, such as research for drug discovery, climate modeling or natural language processing, can be delivered without memory constraints. By applying CXL technology to break through the memory bottleneck, XConn is helping to advance next-generation applications where a universal interface can allow CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators to share memory seamlessly.”
“Riding this wave, XConn has innovated the first hybrid switch to deliver both PCIe and CXL interconnect technologies on the same chip. This gives systems designers unprecedented flexibility to architect next-generation systems to accommodate today’s and tomorrow’s workloads and enables readiness for the AI generation.”
Formation Of Xconn
How did the idea for the company come together? Mallampati shared:
“XConn was founded to solve an emerging need for increased memory bandwidth to support processing-intensive applications while lowering the data center drain on the world’s sustainability.”
“In today’s current data centers, memory utilization is still extremely low – like 10 to 15 percent. Most of the time, memory is simply just sitting there, not doing anything but still burning power. You have to supply coding to the system just to cool down the data center, even if you’re not really doing anything useful.”
“However, as the world begins to rapidly adopt AI and HPC applications the processing demands will dramatically escalate. The electricity consumption, and cost and effort to cool data centers down will become a monstrous challenge. It will be an insurmountable problem contributing to global warming and will significantly impact the world’s sustainability.”
“It’s XConn’s mission to solve this challenge. By designing interconnects and composable memory effectively, we can optimize power efficiency and drive down power consumption by enabling memory sharing and pooling so that data centers can operate more sustainably.”
Best Part Of The Job
What has been your favorite part of working for XConn? Mallampati reflected:
“The innovative culture. We’ve truly taken an industry challenge and identified a unique way to solve it. As a result, we are making a difference in how the world can adopt AI and HPC applications while lowering their impact on energy consumption. This will enable the acceleration of applications that can have true global benefits, such as cancer research or security threat prevention because they can now be delivered without memory constraints.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Mallampati explained:
“XConn offers the industry’s first and only hybrid CXL 2.0 and PCIe Gen 5 switch. Combining both interconnect technologies on a single 256-lane SoC, the XConn switch is able to offer the industry’s lowest port-to-port latency and lowest power consumption per port in a single chip – all at a low total cost of ownership.”
“What’s more, system designers only have to design once to achieve versatile expansion, heterogeneous integration for a mix of accelerators, and fault tolerance with the redundancy that mission-critical applications require for true processing availability.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Mallampati faced in building the company? Mallampati acknowledged:
“The biggest challenge is that we’re a startup and as a result we must prove ourselves. This is our first product, and our customers are mainstays in the processing business. As a result, we have to be sure we live up to expectations and deliver flawlessly out of the gate. We can’t let traditional startup resource limitations get in our way. It’s about execution as much as it is innovation. We’re learning quickly how to deliver on both.”
Evolution Of Xconn’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Mallampati noted:
“Being in a fast-moving industry means we must move faster. Since launching, we’ve already become the only vendor to deliver a truly hybrid switch solution, offering both PCIe and CXL. Yet, offering both technologies means we also need to adapt quickly to meet the changes in both standards. We are already actively making the transition in our products from PCIe Gen 5 to PCIe Gen 6.1 and from CXL 2.0 to CXL 3.1 so that we can be the first interconnect vendor to offer each, let alone both. It’s truly been an exercise in rapid execution.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Mallampati cited:
“We’ve been shipping A0 version silicon since the summer of 2022. And now we’re about to start shipping our production B0 version. This will be a significant milestone technically and another first-to-market in our industry.”
“Along with those internal technical milestones for our own chip, some of the other significant moments for us have been in our work with the CPU vendors and memory vendors as partners. It’s a great feeling as a startup to have our products integrated into major vendor labs. Every time we get a new CPU up and running it’s a milestone moment because we know that we’ve been embraced as a valued technology player. Each new customer solution we are a part of creates a new milestone moment we are very proud of.”
Value Proposition
Can you share your specific customer value proposition? Mallampati highlighted:
“XConn truly stands out as the only provider of a hybrid PCIe / CXL chip. That is important because compared to other PCIe-only solutions, our customers get two capabilities in one. Customers only have to design in one chip to get the flexibility of both interconnect technologies, so their end solution meets the needs of any application – traditional or next-generation for AI and HPC applications. That can mean a lot of savings advantages in terms of on-board space, power and price. In addition, our switch delivers latency that is almost half of the competition, which could be a huge performance gain. As more and more systems are being deployed for AI and machine learning, the latency becomes a game changer.”
“Even further, XConn offers 256 interconnect lanes, which gives our switch the largest lane count in the industry. In fact, we have almost two times the number of lanes when compared to our closest competitor. This, combined with our low power consumption and footprint, positions XConn for success.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Mallampati assessed:
“ABI Research has reported that the total addressable market for PCIe technology alone will reach $10 billion by 2027, driven by increased processing requirements of both traditional and next-generation workloads. The cadence of adoption for CXL technology, which adds further bandwidth capabilities on top of PCIe, will incrementally accelerate these projections. According to Yole Development research, CXL solutions will transform the server memory challenges into a $15 billion market opportunity by 2028.”
“XConn is uniquely qualified to capitalize on both of these growth opportunities as the only provider of a hybrid PCIe and CXL switch with the potential to pivot with the market growth for each interconnect standard. It’s truly a greenfield opportunity ahead for us.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Mallampati concluded:
“We are laser-focused on helping our customers enable the AI/Machine Learning era in an efficient and sustainable way. Working at the connectivity layer, XConn will continue to be the first to market with ever-evolving PCIe and CXL technology so that the industry can empower breakthrough discoveries and transformations using AI without affecting our fragile global environment.”
“By lowering the power consumption of high-performance computing we will make an impact on tomorrow’s technology innovation by enabling more efficient memory sharing and pooling so data centers can operate more sustainably.”
