The HyperTransport Consortium, of which Apple is a member, has announced the availability of the first HyperTransport Compatibility Platform. This product, co-developed by consortium members Xilinx and GDA Technologies, and made available commercially by GDA Technologies, is the first compatibility platform for ensuring interoperability between HyperTransport-enabled devices.
The Consortium is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting HyperTransport technology as an open, freely available industry specification for high bandwidth chip-to-chip communications. HyperTransport interconnect technology is designed as a point-to-point link for integrated circuits and was developed to enable the chips inside of high-performance computer, networking and communications 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 can also be built atop the existing PCI standard.
The current main bus on a Mac runs at around 1GB per second. AGP runs at less than half that, and PCI usually runs at about 128MB to 256MB per second, though all three have real-world issues that keep their performance lower than their theoretical numbers. HyperTransport has the potential to replace all of them (internally), and run at up to 12.8GB per second. It’s expected that future Macs will include the technology, but Apple hasn’t commented on what plans, if any, it has for the technology. See our article for details.
The HyperTransport Compatibility Platform incorporates the Consortium-approved DUT (Device Under Test) Connector and can be used to verify the compliance of Integrated Circuits (ICs) with HyperTransport caves, tunnels, switches, and host bridges to the approved HyperTransport Compliance Check List. For end users, this means that consumers of HyperTransport-enabled devices and systems can be assured that they’ll be compatible.
HyperTransport technology is licensed on a royalty-free basis through the HyperTransport Technology Consortium and is a universal chip-to-chip I/O technology that provides high bandwidth, scalability, low-cost implementations and software compatibility with legacy PCI I/O technology.