The specifications of Version 3 of the Hypertransport Bus have recently been announced. As used by AMD's Opteron processor, the HT Bus is used to interlink the cpu to the other system components and with this revision, the speed of the bus has been upped to 20.8GB/s - two 'links' can be bonded to give a staggering 41.6GB/s. By comparison, the fastest Intel can muster this year is expected to be 10.6GB/s (however, Intel's design shares the bus over four devices, whereas AMD's is a straight link between two). As another measure, the aggregate bandwidth of present systems is 8GB/s, running in 16-bit width with a clock speed of 1GHz. The revised HT3 bus should deliver 41.6GB/s, running 32-bit with a clock speed of 2.6GHz. Over 8 times faster, theoretically
Yeah HTT is clearly more advanced that whatever Intel can come up with, and its good that they link directly between devices as to keep speeds up and latancies down.
Every step AMD and Intel take in this direction (=faster) is good, but I do ask myself, does the current bus get saturated but present CPU's? It's cool to have a 20GB/s bus, but if the CPU can't follow, that's wasted
With working quad-core samples coming (presumably) in the next few months, it makes sense to boost the system with future expansion in mind.
