* More than 30 million HyperTransport ports will be shipped in 2003, says IDC
A bus technology that AMD developed and is used in its recently launched Opteron processors is gaining the attention of users, analysts say.
According to an IDC study, more than 30 million HyperTransport ports will be shipped this year. This number will increase to 200 million ports in 2006.
HyperTransport technology is used in servers, desktop, mobile PCs and some network gear. It is a chip-to-chip I/O technology that gives devices high bandwidth, low latency and backward compatibility with PCI bus-enabled equipment. The technology is, according to AMD’s claims, about six times as fast as the throughput in today’s computer systems.
The bus technology replaces the multilevel buses used in systems today with new technology that gives 12.8G-bit/sec bandwidth. It uses point-to-point links. The Opteron processor, for instance, has three HyperTransport links for an aggregate bandwidth of 19.2G-bit/sec – two links are used for communication between processors and one for communicating with the rest of the system.
AMD replaced the traditional front-side bus with HyperTransport and in doing so, separated I/O data and memory. The technology is licensed by the HyperTransport Technology Consortium on a royalty-free basis and Broadcom, Cisco, Sun and AMD are among the consortium members.
