IBM, TI, EMC and National Semiconductor are among the latest companies to join the HyperTransport Technology Consortium (HTC).

HyperTransport is a chip-to-chip interconnect technology originally pushed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., but now with strong support from the likes of Nvidia, Via, Broadcom, Xilinx, Altera, Agilent and Transmeta. These ranks of support are swelled today by the addition of IBM, TI, EMC, National Semiconductor and also Network Appliance, LTX and Media Fusion.

Gabriele Sartori, president of the HTC, said the addition of the new companies was significant because it significantly increases the potential scope for the interconnect technology, giving it a foothold beyond the microprocessor space and pushing it into storage, analog and communications applications. Adding companies with the significance of IBM and TI is huge, he said.

Sartori cited figures from research firm IDC, stating that over 30 million ports featuring HyperTransport will ship this year, with this number expected to increase to 200 million in 2006.

HyperTransport already has design wins with Microsoft’s Xbox games console, Apple’s PowerPC G5 processor, networking equipment boxes from Cisco (with the HyperTransport parts supplied by Broadcom and PMC-Sierra). Both IBM and Cray have announced plans to build supercomputers using HyperTransport. AMD is pushing HyperTransport into servers with its Opteron processor, and its Athlon 64 chip brings HyperTransport to the desktop.

Some analysts have pointed out that HyperTransport’s biggest competition right now is from the new versions of the legacy PCI bus technology (PCI-X and PCI-Express), which has previously dominated the computing industry. Intel is putting its weight behind PCI-Express as the next-generation interconnect of choice. With two standards on the table, several companies are investigating the worth of supporting both, but in different applications. Sartori sees HyperTransport not as competing with PCI’s future, but complementing it and even assisting its deployment.

“We’re here now and we extend not only PCI-based products because we’re PCI software compatible, but also PCI-X and when PCI-Express gets here we’ll be complementary to that as well,” he said. “PCI-X has pretty good data rates but you get clogged up when you have multiple boards on a PCI-X bus, it kills your throughput as soon as you add another system. With HyperTransport being PCI compatible, you can hook up multiple PCI-X systems to a HyperTransport link and have full bandwidth no matter how many you add in. Plus you can have each PCI-Express talking to its I/O subsystem independently of the other. HyperTransport is a great way to enable high-end PCI Express type systems inexpensively on the board.”

By: DocMemory
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