# An Introduction to the Compute Express Link (CXL) Interconnect

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11227/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [PAPI: Exploiting Dynamic Parallelism in Large Language Model Decoding with a Processing-In-Memory-Enabled Computing System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15470/) (2025)
- [ESPN: Memory-Efficient Multi-Vector Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05417/) (2023)
- [A Cost-Effective Near-Storage Processing Solution for Offline Inference of Long-Context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09921/) (2025)
- [REIS: A High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Retrieval System with In-Storage Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16444/) (2025)
- [Adaptive KV Cache Reuse for Fast Long-Context LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24022/) (2026)
- [SmartQuant: CXL-based AI Model Store in Support of Runtime Configurable Weight Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15866/) (2024)
- [SAC: Disaggregated KV Cache System for Sparse Attention LLMs with CXL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19746/) (2026)
- [TRACE: Unlocking Effective CXL Bandwidth via Lossless Compression and Precision Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03377/) (2025)
- [From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02574/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open industry-standard interconnect between processors and devices such as accelerators, memory buffers, smart network interfaces, persistent memory, and solid-state drives. CXL offers coherency and memory semantics with bandwidth that scales with PCIe bandwidth while achieving significantly lower latency than PCIe. All major CPU vendors, device vendors, and datacenter operators have adopted CXL as a common standard. This enables an inter-operable ecosystem that supports key computing use cases including highly efficient accelerators, server memory bandwidth and capacity expansion, multi-server resource pooling and sharing, and efficient peer-to-peer communication. This survey provides an introduction to CXL covering the standards CXL 1.0, CXL 2.0, and CXL 3.0. We further survey CXL implementations, discuss CXL's impact on the datacenter landscape, and future directions.