HyperTransport lands new backers, products
ITworld.com 7/15/02
itworld.com
Tom Krazit, IDG News Service, Boston Bureau
Eleven new companies have joined the HyperTransport Technology Consortium, bringing the total of participating companies to 51 in just under a year since Advanced Micro Devices Inc. formed the group to promote its HyperTransport interconnect technology.
HyperTransport technology enables point-to-point high-speed data exchange between integrated circuits (ICs) on chips. Data-transmission speeds of up to 12.8G bytes per second in a 32-bit HyperTransport I/O link can be reached using the technology, as compared to 266M bytes per second using older technologies. HyperTransport allows for simultaneous and bi-directional exchange of data, whereas older technologies only allowed data to flow in one direction at a time.
With Monday's announcement, Actel Corp., American Megatrends Inc., ATI Technologies Inc., Cavium Networks Inc., Dolphin Technology Inc., Multinode Microsystems Corp., PLX Technology Inc., Primarion Corp., Silicon Integrated Systems Corp., Tektronix Inc., and Via Technologies Inc. join the consortium.
AMD announced the HyperTransport technology in February 2001, and formed the HyperTransport Technology Consortium in July 2001 with charter members Apple Computer Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Transmeta Corp., Nvidia Corp., API NetWorks Inc., and PMC-Sierra Inc.
The consortium's goal is to promote the technology as the best way to provide the bandwidth required to support the forthcoming Infiniband standard, according to the consortium's Web site. Infiniband is a technology for linking servers with high-speed data connections across longer distances than HyperTransport can support.
Three technologies are competing to become the standard for data exchange among chips, peripherals, and other internal hardware: HyperTransport, PCI-X (peripheral component interconnect - extended), and RapidIO, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for Insight 64, a market research company in Saratoga, California. HyperTransport has the advantage right now, since products are shipping with the technology incorporated directly onto the processor, he said.
PCI-X was developed jointly by IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., and the former Compaq Computer Corp., and is supported by AMD rival Intel Corp. Products containing PCI-X technology won't ship until the end of 2003 or beginning of 2004, said Brookwood. RapidIO is focused on the networking industry, and vendors are just beginning to ship products containing the technology, he said.
AMD is using HyperTransport technology as the basis for its next-generation chips, code named "Hammer," which are due out around the end of 2002 or the beginning of 2003, said Brookwood. Because AMD has put HyperTransport directly onto the chip, it will have a speed advantage when communicating with other HyperTransport-equipped chips on networking and graphics hardware, although it's too soon to tell exactly how much of an advantage AMD will enjoy, he said.
Four companies also announced products Monday that support the HyperTransport technology, bringing the total number of products to over 30. Cavium announced an update to its roster of multiservices security processors for cryptography and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and IPsec (Internet Protocol security) protocol processing, Nitrox Plus. Graphics hardware maker Nvidia unveiled the nForce2 processing platform architecture, an update to its nForce chipset introduced last year.
SiPackets Inc., a maker of IC interconnect technology, released the SP1011 HyperTransport to PCI Bridge, which connects the HyperTransport bus with older PCI (peripheral component interconnect) buses. And Xilinx Inc. has released the 800M bps (bits per second) Single-Ended Slave Intellectual Property core for the Virtex-II Platform FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays).
Tom Krazit is a correspondent for the IDG News Service. |
