Hyper about HyperTransport
 
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Apple Computer last week became the newest member of the HyperTransport Consortium, a group of vendors led by AMD aimed at promoting the new HyperTransport high-speed bus architecture.
In addition to AMD, API Networks, Cisco, Sun and Transmeta are also members.
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HyperTransport is an internal point-to-point link that interconnects integrated circuits (IC) on a motherboard and speeds the transfer of data between them. Previously dubbed Lightning Data Transport, the technology was invented by AMD and is much faster than the PCI bus, AMD claims.
HyperTransport is designed for use in PCs and servers where a high-speed, scalable and low-latency technology is needed for database and other I/O intensive applications. It is also intended to be used in Internet connectivity devices and appliances.
The technology is backward compatible with PCI-bus machines and operates at 6.4G bytes per second. PCI transfers data at 133M bytes/sec; PCI-X operates at 1G bytes/sec; and InfiniBand operates at 4G bytes/sec.
HyperTransport is not an alternative to the InfiniBand switched fabric interface. Infiniband will connect PCs to external peripheral devices, whereas HyperTransport is an 'in-the-box' solution aimed solely at increasing the speed of internal processing. The HyperTransport bus has two point-to-point one-way links, each 2-32 bits wide. With HyperTransport, each source IC is connected to a destination IC, and additional ICs may be daisy-chained from that destination IC. In addition to PCI, PCI-X and InfiniBand, the HyperTransport bus can also connect to existing IDE or SCSI buses.
AMD intends to ship HyperTransport products next year.
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Deni Connor is a senior editor at Network World covering storage, SANs, Novell and Novell-related products. You can reach her at dconnor@nww.com.
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