This paper describes AMD’s Hyper Transport technology, a new I/O architecture for personal computers, workstations, servers, high-performance networking and communications systems, and embedded applications. This scalable architecture can provide significantly increased bandwidth over existing bus architectures and can simplify in-the-box connectivity by replacing legacy buses and bridges. The programming model used in Hyper Transport technology is compatible with existing models and requires little or no changes to existing operating system and driver software.

HyperTransport technology is a high-speed, high-performance, point-to-point link for integrated circuits, and is designed to meet the bandwidth needs of tomorrow’s computing and communications platforms. At a peak throughput of up to 12.8GB/s per link, HyperTransport technology provides an I/O solution for the most demanding system applications.

It provides a universal connection designed to reduce the number of buses within the system, provide a high-performance link for embedded applications, and enable highly scalable multiprocessing systems. It is designed to enable the chips inside of PCs and networking and communications devices to communicate with each other up to 48 times faster than with existing technologies. HyperTransport technology provides an extremely fast connection that complements externally visible bus standards like the PCI, as well as emerging technologies like InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet. HyperTransport technology is truly the universal solution for in-the-box connectivity.