Astera Labs unveils Leo 2 CXL memory expanders with PCIe Gen6 and four DDR4 channels per card

Astera Labs launched the second generation of its Leo memory controllers, moving from PCIe Gen5 and CXL 2.x to PCIe Gen6 and CXL 3.2. The family has an entry E-series for one host CPU, a P-series for expanders shared by two hosts, and a first-generation X-series fabric-attached controller that works with Scorpio switches. Leo 2 doubles memory channels per card to four, which lets operators reuse DDR4 from retired systems.

• Memory channels per card doubled from 2 to 4
• Qualifying up to 768GB of DDR4 or 4TB of DDR5 per expander
• PCIe Gen6 and CXL 3.2 support
• RAS features include a hardware DIMM test engine and soft-ECC on top of hardware ECC