Hyper-Transport Support

[Pghpooh]

Hi
It's been over 5 years since I built my last computer. I want to build a new one and started to research everything from the cpu's to power supplies to cases, etc.
One term that I am not aware of is "Hyper-Transport Support" that AMD uses in it's processors.
What is "Hyper-Transport Support??"
Is there any advantage to having it or not?
I plan to use the new pc for personal finance, some video editing, photo editing and would like to use a tv tuner.
Thanks
Pghpooh

 

[Kromis]

Its really just AMD's version of Intel's FSB

 

[GundamSonicZeroX]

^ Pretty much what he said.

 

[Markfw]

It is an advanced technology compared to FSB that lets the CPU talk to other CPU's, memory and almost everything. At the moment the Conroe is the only desktop chip from Intel you should consider. The AMD line is fine, but Conroe is a little ahead except for Hypertransport right now, so any AMD chip is fine now in that respect.

 

[myocardia]

What HTT amounts to, assuming you know much about how computers work, is a much more efficient way for the cpu to communicate with the memory, and any other processor in the system. That's why the AMD cpu's seriously outperformed the Intel cpu's, at least until Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo cpu's, recently. Now the Core 2 Duo's are the fastest cpu's available for a "normal" person to buy.

edit: What I should really have said to begin with, is that HTT is just a replacement for the fsb (front-side bus). The reason that the Athlon 64's were faster than a "seemingly" faster Pentium is that the Athlon 64's "data path" is extremely wide, and quite short. This allows any data to be transferred at very fast speeds.

The HTT is so wide that it can handle all of the data that any processor normally has to handle, and still have room left for communication between one processor, and up to 7 other processors. This made it faster at the relatively low bandwidth things that processors normally have to contend with.

 

[Furen]

Hypertransport has nothing to do with communicating with the memory unless it's another CPU's memory. Hypertransport links different CPU crossbars to one another and, of course, to the chipset.

Example: RAM=CPU---HT Link---Chipset

Hypertransport only handles memory traffic when a CPU has to access another CPU's RAM or in the case of a DMA device. That means that a CPU has full access to its own memory bandwidth regardless of hypertransport utilization, so your memory bandwidth will not be bottlenecked by other operations. How this differs from Intel's approach is that since the memory controller is on the northbridge, the FSB handles memory traffic in addition to all IO traffic, which can become a bottleneck, particularly so in multi-socket systems.

Like myocardia said, the fastest single-socket CPU you can buy right now is a Core 2 Duo. Are you overclocking at all? If not then going AMD is not a bad alternative either, since AMD CPUs are priced quite fairly compared to their Core 2 Duo counter parts (though I'd lean towards Intel if the overall price difference is small). A small advantage for AMD is also the fact that integrated graphics motherboards don't suck as badly as Intel's integrated graphics, since they're based on Nvidia or ATI technology (careful, though, there're also some VIA and SIS mobos out there, and those do suck). While no integrated graphics solution will let you play the newest games out there, Intel's graphics are horrendous beyond belief. If going for something that is NOT dual-core then AMD is your best bet. Its Semprons are generally better than Intel's celerons and regular Athlon 64s are quite cheap, too (I'd say a A64 3000+ is around the equivalent of a Sempron 3400+ or so).