Hyper Transport

Hyper Transport technology is a very fast, low latency, point-to-point link used for inter-connecting integrated circuits on board. Hyper Transport, previously codenamed as Lightning Data Transport (LDT), provides the bandwidth and flexibility critical for today's networking and computing platforms while retaining the fundamental programming model of PCI. Hyper Transport was invented by AMD and perfected with the help of several partners throughout the industry. Hyper Transport was designed to support both CPU-to-CPU communications as well as CPU-to-I/O transfers, thus, it features very low latency. It provides up to 22.4 Gigabyte/second aggregate CPU to I/O or CPU to CPU bandwidth in a highly efficient chip-to-chip technology that replaces existing complex multi-level buses . While microprocessor performance continues to double every eighteen months, the performance of the I/O bus architecture has lagged, doubling in performance approximately every three years. A number of new technologies are responsible for the increasing demand for additional bandwidth.