This describes AMD s Hyper Transport technology, a new I/O architecture for perso nal computers, workstations, servers,

high-performance networking and communicat ions systems, and embedded applications. This scalable architecture can provide significantly increased bandwidth over existing bus architectures and can simpli fy in-the-box connectivity by replacing legacy buses and bridges. The programmin g model used in Hyper Transport technology is compatible with existing models an d requires little or no changes to existing operating system and driver software . It provides a universal connection designed to reduce the number of buses within the system. 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 tha n with existing technologies. Hyper Transport technology is truly the universal solution for in-the-box connectivity. >> It is a new I/O architecture for personal computers, workstations, servers, e mbedded applications etc. >> It is a scalable architecture can provide significantly increased. bandwidth over existing bus architectures . >> It simplify in-the-box connectivity by replacing legacy buses and bridges. >> The programming model used in Hyper Transport technology is compatible with e xisting models and requires little or no changes to existing operating system an d driver software. Hyper Transport technology provides high speeds while maintaining full software and operating system compatibility with the Peripheral Component Interconnect (P CI) interface that is used in most systems today. In older multi-drop bus archit ectures like PCI, the addition of hardware devices affects the overall electrica l characteristics and bandwidth of the entire bus. Even with PCI-X1.0, the maxim um supported clock speed of 133MHz must be reduced when more than one PCI-X devi ce is attached. Hyper Transport technology uses a point-to-point link that is co nnected between two devices, enabling the overall speed of the link to transfer data much faster