HyperTransport Consortium Announces New HTX OEM Reference Design Kit; University Of Mannheim Develops Reference Design Kit to Enable Rapid Deployment of HTX Peripherals.SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- The HyperTransport(TM) Technology Consortium, a non-profit organization A non-profit organization (abbreviated "NPO", also "non-profit" or "not-for-profit") is a legally constituted organization whose primary objective is to support or to actively engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit purposes. dedicated to developing, promoting and licensing the industry's lowest latency, highest bandwidth HyperTransport interconnect technology, today announced that researchers at the University of Mannheim The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. Though it sees its roots back to the Kurpfälzische Akademie der Wissenschaften of 1763, the actual university was founded in 1907 as college for economics. (Mannheim, Germany) have developed a highly programmable HTX HTX HyperTransport (high speed low latency chip to chip interlink) HTX Højere Teknisk Eksamen (Danish Technical College) HTX Hungarian Traded Index HTX Hemothorax HTX human tumor xenograft OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and reference design kit. The kit is intended to facilitate the rapid deployment of peripheral card See expansion board. subsystems based on the HyperTransport HTX(TM) connector specification, and is on display this week at the International Supercomputing Conference 2006, Booth B39-B42, in Dresden, Germany. The HTX connector specification, standardized by the HyperTransport Technology Consortium, defines an interface for linking high-performance subsystems directly to the system CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. or CPUs via low-latency HyperTransport links. OEMs today are leveraging the HTX connector in low-latency server clustering See clustering. , network security processing, packet management and math acceleration. The University of Mannheim's HTX reference design kit includes all of the necessary hardware and software, schematics and bill of materials The list of components that make up a system. For example, a bill of materials for a house would include the cement block, lumber, shingles, doors, windows, plumbing, electric, heating and so on. information needed to design and debug To correct a problem in hardware or software. Debugging software means locating the errors in the source code (the program logic). Debugging hardware means finding errors in the circuit design (logical circuits) or in the physical interconnections of the circuits. peripheral products based on the HTX connector specification. It also includes a prototyping board to enable OEMs to quickly test and evaluate their HTX subsystem features and functionality. "The University of Mannheim -- one of our international academic members -- has delivered a precious development tool, particularly useful to reduce development costs, resource investments and time-to-market for HTX-based OEM solutions," said Mario Cavalli, general manager of the HyperTransport Consortium. "With this design kit, peripheral manufacturers have a much-needed blueprint for the development of high-performance, low-latency peripheral subsystems, increasingly in demand for data center, scientific and industrial applications." "Our goal was to create a rapid prototyping and development platform that would enable system designers to take advantage of the superior performance delivered by state-of-the-art HTX connectivity and FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) A type of gate array that is programmed in the field rather than in a semiconductor fab. Containing up to hundreds of thousands of gates, there are a variety of FPGA architectures on the market. components," said Prof. Ulrich Bruning, University of Mannheim. "With the HTX direct-connect CPU interface, designers can deliver powerful, high performance computing systems ideally suited for network, enterprise, media, communications and storage industry sectors, as well as application-specific co-processing applications. This kit is an important tool in enabling the rapid deployment of peripheral designs based on HTX." The HTX reference board features HyperTransport HTX direct-connect slot interface (16-bit wide), highly sophisticated Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA, several high speed serial links (connected to six SFPs and one SATA (Serial ATA) A serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been the de facto standard hard disk interface for desktop PCs for more than two decades. The original Parallel ATA (PATA) interface was launched in 1986. connector), 128 MByte double data rate (DDR (Double Data Rate) Refers to an SDRAM memory chip that increases performance by doubling the effective data rate of the frontside bus. For more details, see SDRAM. DDR - Double Data Rate Random Access Memory 2) DRAM (optional 512 MByte) with a 32-bit wide interface, 512 Mbit user-programmable flash memory and a Gigabit Ethernet transceiver with a RJ45-connector. The HTX reference design board can be plugged into any HyperTransport HTX-capable system or motherboard. The reference design kit is currently available upon request through the University of Mannheim. Interested parties should contact Prof. Ulrich Bruning via e-mail at ulrich@ra.ti.uni-mannheim.de. Detailed information on the HTX reference design can also be found on the HyperTransport Consortium website at http://www.hypertransport.org. About the HyperTransport(TM) Technology Consortium The HyperTransport Technology Consortium is a membership-based, non-profit organization that manages, promotes and licenses HyperTransport Technology. The HyperTransport Consortium consists of over 40 industry-leading member companies, including founding member Advanced Micro Devices, Alliance Semiconductor, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, NVIDIA, PMC-Sierra, Sun Microsystems and Transmeta. Membership is based on a yearly fee and it is open to any company interested in licensing the royalty-free use of HyperTransport technology and intellectual property. Consortium members have full access to HyperTransport technical documents database, they may attend Consortium meetings and events and may benefit from a variety of technical and marketing services, including the new, member-driven web portal, whose business benefits are part of a wide array of services offered by the Consortium free of charge to member companies. To learn more about member benefits and on how to become a Consortium member, please visit the Consortium Web site at www.hypertransport.org/consortium/cons_join.cfm. Specifications, overviews and white papers about HyperTransport technology can be found at www.hypertransport.org/tech/index.cfm. HyperTransport and HTX are licensed trademarks of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners. |
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