by Anna Filatova
01/27/2001 | 06:21 AM
AMD keeps pushing forward its LDT bus (Lightning Data Transport) quite successfully. According to Techweb, AMD has already granted its license to NVIDIA, i.e. by tying itself to LDT, NVIDIA also has virtually committed to making an Athlon-compatible chipset. Besides, about 100 companies have expressed interest in the LDT bus, which is quite justified, because this bus is a separate development and can be used independently of a chipset. In other words, its application isn’t restricted by the PCs only.
By the way, the current LDT version for Athlon-chipsets ("coherent LDT") features the doubled bandwidth equal to 1.6GB/sec. And the next bus version is very likely to have twice this bandwidth: 3.2GB/sec. "Coherent LDT" bus is very likely to be implemented in the chipset for a new 64bit Hammer processor.
Nevertheless, the first chipset to feature the new LDT bus will most probably be NVIDIA Crush. The chipset South Bridge - MCP chip announced in September – will be connected to the North Bridge with a 8bit LDT bus providing the bandwidth of 800MB/sec. Moreover, it also looks like LDT will be used in Microsoft X-Box gaming console...