IBM, National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments and EMC have joined the HyperTransport Technology Consortium, the organisation said today.

IBM, at least, was keen to point out that that the move is not a rejection of Rapid IO, the other next-generation chip-to-chip bus the company has been backing.

"HyperTransport is one of many I/O technologies that is rapidly becoming a standard chip-to-chip communications technology for high-performance processors and subsystems," said Lisa Su, director of PowerPC and emerging products at IBM Microelectronics, in a statement. "We are pleased to provide HyperTransport along with other leading I/O technologies to our customers requiring low latency and high bandwidth."

Su's role suggests that IBM may be looking to extend its PowerPC processor family with HyperTransport. While IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip doesn't support HT, the chip's chief 970 customer, Apple, does use the next-generation bus to connect its IBM-manufactured North Bridge chip to its South Bridge part.

HyperTransport is a serial, point-to-point bus designed to allow chips to exchange data at speeds of up to 12.8GBps. ®