HyperTransport 3.0 Arrives!

HyperTransport Consortium Maintains Interconnect Performance Leadership with New 3.0 Specification

Sunnyvale, Calif., April 24, 2006 -- HyperTransport^TM Technology Consortium, a standards
organization dedicated to developing the industry's lowest latency, highest bandwidth
interconnect technology, today released version 3.0 of the HyperTransport specification. The new
standard nearly doubles the bandwidth and speed of the previous HyperTransport 2.0
specification. In addition, HyperTransport 3.0 supports a variety of new features including AC
coupling mode, hot plugging, un-ganging mode and dynamic power management for the support
of extended signal transmission distance, typical of backplane and chassis-to-chassis
implementations. HyperTransport 3.0 builds on the existing HyperTransport 1.0 and 2.0
standards which continue to be designed into end systems at an accelerating rate, and have
helped HyperTransport reach considerable market presence and success. HyperTransport 3.0 is
fully backwards-compatible with earlier versions of the HyperTransport specification standard.
"The added performance and new features of HyperTransport 3.0 extend the applicability of
HyperTransport technology from chip-to-chip and board-to-board, all the way to chassis-tochassis applications," said Mario Cavalli, general manager of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. "HyperTransport has proven to be the industry's most flexible, powerful and futureready standard interconnect solution for compute-intensive system designs, delivering a winning combination of high-performance, standardization and optimized total cost of ownership (TCO) for data center and supercomputing applications."

Technical Features and Benefits of HyperTransport 3.0

• AC mode (Optional) - An innovative AC interconnect mode complements HyperTransport's
  traditional DC mode, featuring capacitor coupling, AC/DC auto-sensing and auto-configuring
  capabilities. The feature extends HyperTransport's maximum signal transmission distance to
  1 meter at maximum specified clock speed with no signal transmission or performance
  degradation. As a result, the HyperTransport standard can now support long-haul signal
  transmission typical of backplane and chassis-to-chassis applications. During power-up and
  in total transparency to system software, HyperTransport 3.0 auto-senses the presence of
  coupling capacitors (AC) and/or direct connections (DC) within the HyperTransport
  interconnect fabric and automatically configures each portion of it accordingly.
• Hot plugging - HyperTransport technology-enabled devices can be added to or removed
  from the HyperTransport fabric without disrupting system operations. HyperTransport cards,
  systems and subsystems can therefore be deployed in backplane and any mission-critical
  platforms requiring high system availability.
• Un-ganging mode (Optional) - During system power-up and transparently to system
  software, 1x16 HyperTransport links can optionally be configured as 2x8 virtual links. This
  gives system architects extended interconnect flexibility and the ability to fully leverage
  existing HyperTransport components and cores. Un-ganging mode is particularly valuable in
  multiprocessor and symmetric multiprocessing environments.
• Power Management Mode - HyperTransport 3.0 carries dynamic, auto-sensing, hardwarebased, self-configuring power management capabilities that give end products the
  intelligence to best optimize the power consumption of each of their HyperTransport
  components and modules in real-time and transparently to operating system (OS) and
  application software.