THE CRUNCH
Kioxia has displayed a 512GB CXL 2.0 device at FMS 2026 that uses its XL-FLASH NAND technology instead of DRAM. The E3.S form factor drive runs at just under 1GB/s with 755ns latency and delivers nearly 2M IOPS under 512-byte loads. The company positions the XL1 as a way to use cheaper NAND for colder memory regions while keeping DRAM for hot data.
The device shown at the show is an E3.S form factor unit that uses CXL 2.0 instead of a traditional PCIe connection. This allows system designers to mix CXL devices with standard NVMe SSDs on the same system. The drive is based on Kioxia's XL-FLASH Generation 2 technology, which offers higher write endurance and lower latency than standard TLC or QLC NAND.
Kioxia notes that while a DRAM-based CXL solution would be faster, many workloads have a mix of hot and cold data. The XL1 allows servers to allocate regions of memory based on access patterns, using NAND for colder regions to lower costs. This approach mirrors the memory architecture vision that Intel pursued with Optane.