PCI Express and Hypertransport

[Melkor]

Hello. I was reading an article:


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1515826,00.asp

I was also reading

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1087&page=2

The following caught my eye:


"
What will PCI-Express mean to the PC?
Like AMD's Hypertransport technology, PCI-Express is a 2-way, serial
connection that carries data in packets, similar to the way it is
transferred over Ethernet connections.
"

So I am confused. Are Hypertransport and PCI Express competing
technologies that do the same basic thing or not?

Will there be PCIExpress graphics cards that will run on a AMD 64 bit
CPU system?

I was just impressed when I read that PCIExpress is so much faster than
AGP 8X.

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

Hello. I was reading an article:


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1515826,00.asp

I was also reading

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1087&page=2

The following caught my eye:


"
What will PCI-Express mean to the PC?
Like AMD's Hypertransport technology, PCI-Express is a 2-way, serial
connection that carries data in packets, similar to the way it is
transferred over Ethernet connections.
"

So I am confused. Are Hypertransport and PCI Express competing
technologies that do the same basic thing or not?

Will there be PCIExpress graphics cards that will run on a AMD 64 bit
CPU system?

I was just impressed when I read that PCIExpress is so much faster than
AGP 8X.

PCI Express is a replacement for PCI and AGP, it's mostly an IO bus.
Hypertransport is a multiprocessor interconnect that doubles as a front
side bus. There will be Hypertransport to PCI Express bridge chips
shortly. Intel processors already have front side bus to PCI express
bridge chips.

 

[Guest]

Does anyone know when the Hypertransport to PCI Express chips will be
out and am I correct in assuming once that happens we can use PCIExpress
video cards like that GeForce 6800 GT?

 

[Matt Austin]

Does anyone know when the Hypertransport to PCI Express chips will be
out and am I correct in assuming once that happens we can use PCIExpress
video cards like that GeForce 6800 GT?

Abit has their new AX8 at abit-usa.com. I don't believe it's for sale
yet, but it offers PCI-E for Socket 939-based A64 systems. It uses
VIA's K8T890 chipset, which so far seems just to be for 939. It remains
to be seen whether socket 754 chipsets will get PCI-E (maybe nVidia?)

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

Abit has their new AX8 at abit-usa.com. I don't believe it's for sale
yet, but it offers PCI-E for Socket 939-based A64 systems. It uses
VIA's K8T890 chipset, which so far seems just to be for 939. It remains
to be seen whether socket 754 chipsets will get PCI-E (maybe nVidia?)

There isn't any reason to wait for PCI Express, there is no significant
difference in performance between the PCI Express and AGP versions
of the current generation of graphics cards. Eventually PCI Express will
matter but by then all motherboards will support it.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

So I am confused. Are Hypertransport and PCI Express competing
technologies that do the same basic thing or not?

At one time, some people thought they would be competing. But as it turns
out they serve entirely different purposes, and end up being complementary
to one another. Their descriptions as both being point-to-point serial
interconnect technologies may have made people think they were competing.

Hypertransports is more of a chip-to-chip interconnect technology. It's main
purpose is to connect chips within a single system board to other chips on
the same board. As such, it is completely useful in such divergent
industries from the computer industry all of the way to the
telecommunications industry. Its main advantage is its simplicity, which
results in low-latency.

PCI Express is more of a robust, complex solution for attaching peripherals
to PCs. The PCI Express specs include not just data lines, but also power
lines to plug-in peripheral cards. Intel thinks it can use PCI Express as a
chip-to-chip interconnect, but it seems doubtful, it's too complex to be a
chip-to-chip communications medium. It's complexity also increases its
latency somewhat.

Will there be PCIExpress graphics cards that will run on a AMD 64 bit
CPU system?

Yes, sure there will be. It's simply a matter of making a chipset that
implements it. This chipset will take Hypertransport lines as its input
lines, and output them to PCI-Express lines. Solutions are being presented
by Nvidia, ATI, SiS, and VIA right now.

Yousuf Khan