AMD Gets Hyper

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday gave its Lightning Data Transport interconnect technology a working name, HyperTransport Technology, and revealed the identities of key industry players involved in its upcoming deployment.

On AMD's drawing board for more than a year, HyperTransport Technology is a packet-based, unidirectional system bus that can deliver performance 24 times faster than current bus technologies, says Charles Mitchell, products strategy manager.

Mitchell says AMD designed HyperTransport Technology to increase the speed with which components within computing systems communicate with one another, and it "will work in anything from PCs to routers to game consoles."

Speeding Up Fast Chips

With its peak data transfer rate of 6.4 gigabits per second, HyperTransport Technology will be integrated into AMD's next-generation processors, Mitchell says.

"[HyperTransport Technology] will arrive in the chip sets that support Athlon later this year," Mitchell says. "But it doesn't change Athlon's socket, it only adds throughput."

The added throughput will significantly increase Athlon's bus speed past its current average of 200 MHz, but Mitchell doesn't offer an exact figure.

HyperTransport Technology will be available to support future AMD processors as well, including the company's 64-bit x86 chip, code-named SledgeHammer, which is slated to begin shipping early next year, he says.

Not just an I/O interconnect, HyperTransport Technology can also support processor interconnects, connecting processor core logic memory controllers together for multiprocessor systems, Mitchell says.

Team HyperTransport

AMD has more than 100 key partners assisting in the development of HyperTransport Technology, including Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, API Networks, and Broadcom.

The first third-party HyperTransport Technology products will be available by year's end, Mitchell says.

AMD is offering incentives to companies who choose to use HyperTransport Technology. The company will collect residuals for the use of HyperTransport Technology, although it has not released details.