TAIPEI, Taiwan — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. officially rolled out its HyperTransport high-speed bus technology at the Taiwan Platform Conference on Wednesday (Feb. 14) and said it has gathered more than 100 companies, including Sun Microsystems, Broadcom, Nvidia and Cisco Systems, to help lay down the infrastructure for the bus' industry acceptance.
AMD has been working on HyperTransport, formerly code-named Lightning Data Transport, for more than three years. It is intended as a point-to-point solution that will enable processors in PCs, networking and communications devices to talk with each other 24 times faster than with current technologies.
The bus technology will be an integral part of the strategy for AMD's 64-bit MPU, code-named Sledgehammer, which will challenge Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium and successor McKinley processors. Designed for use in servers, HyperTransport uses a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture that connects an eight-way or higher configuration of processors for high performance multiprocessing.
AMD has acknowledged in the past that under a NUMA blueprint a CPU accessing memory at the far end of the processor chain has to go farther than if it were on a shared bus. But higher bandwidth with a peak transfer rate of 6.4 gigabytes per second enabled through HyperTransport compensates for that deficiency, the company said.
AMD said it intends to form a consortium to support the new bus technology and is in the process of licensing the technology to companies for use in products that should hit the market next year.
