The HyperTransport Technology Consortium — founded to develop, promote and manage specifications of the HyperTransport I/O link technology — today released the 1.03 HyperTransport specification for public download via the consortium’s Web site.
Maintaining the HyperTransport technology as a royalty-free and open interconnect standard, the consortium published the specification to enable designers of computer, networking, telecommunications and embedded applications to more easily evaluate the high-speed HyperTransport link within their next generation designs, Gabriele Sartori, president of HyperTransport Technology Consortium, said.
“We decided to make the specification public, enabling designers to evaluate the specification before formally adopting HyperTransport technology and receiving a royalty-free license by becoming a member of the consortium,” he said. “The publication of the HyperTransport I/O Link specification removes the administrative hassles chip and system designers typically encounter as they sort out their choices for next-generation interconnect technologies.”
Apple is one of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium’s founding members along with AMD, API NetWorks, Cisco Systems, Nvidia, PMC-Sierra, Sun Microsystems and Transmeta. HyperTransport interconnect technology is a new high-speed, high-performance, point-to-point link for integrated circuits, developed to enable the chips inside of high-performance computer, networking and communication devices to communicate with each other faster than with existing technologies. HyperTransport technology’s bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec purportedly offers up to a 48-fold increase in data throughput, compared with existing system interconnects that typically provide bandwidth up to 266MB/sec.
HyperTransport complements externally visible bus standards like the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), as well as emerging technologies like InfiniBand and 10GB Ethernet. Although initially developed for high-performance personal computer and server platforms, the technology is also gaining momentum in networking and communications devices, embedded applications and other non-PC devices. Multiple products integrating support for HyperTransport technology are in development to support desktop and notebook PCs, workstations and servers, and Internet communication devices.
For more info on HyperTransport see our July 30, Aug. 6, and Aug. 8 articles.