HyperTransport Adds Members

HyperTransport, technology aimed at faster I/O, is picking up speed in the industry.

Seven companies, including EMC, IBM, LTX, Media Fusion, National Semiconductor, Network Appliance and Texas Instruments, this week joined the HyperTransport Consortium, set up to admininister the development of the technology.

This fall, HyperTransport will add special hooks for packet-based communication.

“Weve pretty much got the heavyweight in every industry in this,” said Bob Nappa, vice president of the consortium. Currently, 45 companies are members, including Intel, Via Technologies, Nvidia and others.

HyperTransport I/O technology, which transfers data at rates up to 12.8 Gbytes per second using point-to-point links, is licensed on a royalty-free basis through the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. It is designed as a replacement for PCI and PCI-X.

“HyperTransport is one of many I/O technologies that is rapidly becoming a standard chip-to-chip communications technology for high-performance processors and subsystems,” said Lisa Su, director of PowerPC and emerging products at IBM Microelectronics, in a statement. “We are pleased to provide HyperTransport along with other leading I/O technologies to our customers requiring low latency and high bandwidth.”

Next up? A DirectPacket extension, which will allow communications firms to support packet-based data transfers from different places on the motherboard. The specification should be finalized at the end of September, a spokesman said.