10. What is the HTX connector standard?
The HyperTransport HTX connector is a HyperTransport Consortium standard that defines the mechanical and electrical characteristics of a slot-type, board-level connector that enables the direct connection of latest-generations of high-performance, board-level peripherals to the system CPU or CPUs. The HTX connector allows compute-intensive peripheral subsystems, like co-processors, High Performance Computing (HPC) server cluster adapters, communication and storage controllers, etc. to interact with the system processor(s) and memory at high bandwidth and minimum latency via a dedicated HyperTransport-based link. The current HTX specification supports 8- or 16-bit HyperTransport links and clock speeds up to 800 MHz, yielding 6.4 Gigabytes/second of aggregate bandwidth. HTX is based on a standard PCI Express mechanical connector (installed in reverse to prevent board misplacements) carrying HyperTransport-specific signals. By leveraging the economy of scale of the multi-sourced PCI Express connector, HTX is extremely cost-effective to implement. Although the current HTX specification amply satisfies the performance requirements of all current and upcoming HTX peripheral subsystems, it does not represent the limits of HTX deliverable performance. Proposals are being reviewed by the Consortium’s Technical Working Group for increasing the HTX clock speed to 1 GHz, which would bring the aggregate bandwidth to 8 Gigabytes/second.
http://www.hypertransport.org/tech/tech_faqs.cfm?m=7#16
