HyperTransport in Network Applications

HyperTransport Provides the Bandwidth Required by Network Equipment

Network traffic continues to expand exponentially and the network equipment at the backbone of the network is being redesigned to support this increased traffic. Speed and processing improvements are focusing on all areas, but two are essential and both involve faster access to memory (buffering and packet forwarding) and faster I/O. In the control plane, the host system processor is being beefed up and often doubled up with multiple processors to handle high level processing such as setting quality of service parameters, load balancing, and policy based connection routing. In this area, advanced 1 GHz system processors and dedicated network processors can use HyperTransport links between processors and I/O and memory.

In the Data Plane, HyperTransport can speed up communications between host processors and the series of ASICs that form the Data Plane. Typically, in the Data Plane different ASICs perform different specialized packet and data processing tasks such as session management, TCP/IP header processing, and MPLS tagging. As incoming packets arrive from the network, they can be routed faster using HyperTransport links to the various processing nodes on the Data Plane and when the Control Plane is also HyperTransport based, packets can be routed extremely fast into DDR SDRAM memory buffers attached to the host or Control Plane processor. This topology is shown in the diagram.