NETWORKS

LAS VEGAS, NV -- The HyperTransport™ Technology Consortium, founded to develop, promote and manage specifications of the HyperTransport I/O link, today announced new networking extensions to address the high-performance demands of networking and telecommunication applications. The enhanced feature set is designed to deliver reliability, flexibility and efficiency to enable communications systems to perform next-generation, high-speed packet processing. Already enjoying broad industry adoption as a high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect and network processor bus, HyperTransport technology is increasing its presence in the PC and communications market with a well-defined technical roadmap that improves its networking capabilities and performance. The HyperTransport networking extensions were developed by the consortium’s Technical Working Group to enhance control plane, data plane and look aside applications. The new networking features include: a message passing protocol for larger packet sizes, an error recovery protocol, support for 64-bit addresses, 16 additional streaming and dedicated virtual channels, greatly increased concurrency support, a standardized HyperTransport switching function and direct peer-to-peer transfer. “The consortium is committed to meeting the needs of our members and their customers and is evolving the specification accordingly,” said Brian Holden, chairperson of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium Technical Working Group and principal engineer for PMC-Sierra's MIPS Processor Division. “These newly added networking extensions reduce complexity, increase efficiency and enhance the overall functionality of HyperTransport I/O specification.” “These new HyperTransport networking extensions are critical for bringing together packet and message processing with the standard read/write protocols for today’s networking and communications systems space,” said Jim Keller, Chief Architect of Broadcom's Broadband Processor Business Unit. “Consortium members in the communications space such as Cisco and Broadcom, some of whom have already adopted the technology for their highest performing network processors, are driving the development of the new networking extensions to ensure the longevity of the HyperTransport specification.” Networking Extensions Reduce Complexity and Increase Efficiency The new HyperTransport networking extensions are designed to ensure interoperability with existing HyperTransport products and complement externally visible bus standards like the Peripheral Components Interconnect (PCI), as well as emerging technologies like InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet. Key networking enhancements include: The addition of a message passing protocol enables HyperTransport technology to stream sequences of packets to a given address. The advanced messaging semantics greatly reduce complexity and increase the efficiency of packet processing for communications applications, ultimately garnering higher performance. The addition of an error handling protocol enables the HyperTransport specification to detect and recover from errors, which increases the reliability and availability of the connection. The optional increase of the supported addressing from 40 bit to 64 bit. The addition of 16 streaming point-to-point flow controlled virtual channels that also enable support of millions of end-to-end flow controlled virtual channels. The virtual channels can be assigned dedicated bandwidth with committed throughput for content-rich networking applications such as voice and video traffic. This feature also allows HyperTransport nodes to efficiently bridge SPI-4.2 traffic. Increased support for concurrent host transactions further improves the flexibility and performance of the HyperTransport specification by allowing over 1,000 transactions to be simultaneously outstanding. The addition of support for direct peer-to-peer transfers increases efficiency by allowing data transfers to occur between non-host nodes without requiring a host reflection. This enables high-bandwidth look-up devices to cooperate directly with each other, further reducing complexity. The formalization of the description of existing HyperTransport hubs and switches clearly defines each within the standard and provides a clear roadmap for each application. Availability The new HyperTransport networking extensions are planned to be available in the second half of 2002.