SAN FRANCISCO — An industry study to be released next week estimates that the global port count for Hyper Transport switch fabric will exceed 30 million ports this year.
International Date Corp. (IDC) said the forecast comes as other alternatives such as Infiniband are still struggling to produce the silicon they need to support the demand for a high-speed interconnects.
By 2006, the IDC projects the number of ports will reach 200 million.
Hyper Transport technology is licensed on a royalty-free basis through the Hyper Transport Consortium. The univeral chip-to-chip I/O technology that provides high bandwidth, low cost and compatibility with legacy shared-bus PCI I/O technology.
Vernon Turner, IDC group vice president, said the 2003 projections are based on actual parts counts ot items shipped and silicon starts and products already committed to production by the end of 2002.
Gabriele Satori, president of the consortium, said several different market segments have emerged that are planning products this year based on the HT spec.
While the majority of shipments will be for future 64-bit workstations and desktop computers, substantial numbers are already being delivered in the growing number of computing and electronics segments, including game consoles and servers.
"The acceptance and use of one of the switch fabrics across s number of different applications will be the determining factor in which alternative will finally dominate," Turner said.
