Marvell Blogs

Archive for June, 2026

June 24, 2026

Structera X and A CXL Compression: Making Every Gigabyte Count

By Arifur Rahman, Director of Product Marketing, Custom Cloud Solutions, Marvell

Modern AI workloads are insatiable consumers of memory. Deep learning recommendation models (DLRM), large language model (LLM) inference, in-memory databases and vector search engines all share a common bottleneck: there is never enough DRAM, and what exists is very expensive.

At today's spot prices—$27–$37 per GB for server-grade DDR5 RDIMMs1—a 12TB memory pool requires nearly half a million dollars in DRAM alone. Meanwhile, AI infrastructure buildouts are consuming server DRAM capacity faster than fabs can produce it, driving prices up 300–400% since mid-2025.^{1, 2}

CXL memory expansion was supposed to solve this. And it does—but there's a subtler lever that most solutions ignore: the data sitting in that memory is compressible, and most CXL controllers don't touch it.

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June 17, 2026

Plasmonics: A Path to Higher Bandwidth in Optics in the AI Era

By Claudia Hoessbacher, Senior Director, and Wolfgang Heni, Director, Optical Engineering, Marvell

Plasmons have been used to accelerate drug discovery, enhance the sensitivity of sensors and even create artistic treasures in the Roman era.

Ongoing research at Marvell seeks to harness them to improve the performance of optical networks for the AI era. Plasmonics, a technology that leverages the properties of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), provides a promising pathway for enhancing the roadmap of silicon photonic (SiPho) light engines, a critical component inside optical modules.

Plasmonic-based SiPho light engines could support modules operating at 3.2T and beyond while consuming a fraction of the space and power per bit of modules based on existing technologies. Manufacturers could leverage foundry process technologies for scaling production.

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