AMD Fusion Developers Summit Day 1 Keynote

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, June 12, 2012, 11:14 PM EDT

Malloy then went on to talk about the relationship between software and hardware developers and how he believes hardware vendors have gotten to a point where we now have a performance surplus and how software developers are leveraging that surplus. He continued on talking about the importance of certain architectures and the importance of having a unified address space.

Software and Hardware Considerations for Heterogeneous Computing

Next Malloy talked about software and platform considerations, and said that we need a higher level of abstractions than current platforms offer to attract more mainstream developers to heterogeneous computing. But he wasn’t sure what those abstractions should be.

Heterogonous System Architecture (HSA)
Phil Rogers AMD Corporate fellow then came out on stage to talk about the company’s Heterogonous System Architecture, or HSA. He drew some parallels between what AMD’s is doing with HSA and what Mr. Malloy wants to come to heterogeneous computing and said with HSA, AMD is bringing the platform to software developers.

Phil Rogers Talks HSA at AFDS '12

Mr. Rogers then went on to talk about the HSA roadmap. He outlined the physical integration that took place in 2011, but putting the CPU and GPU on the same silicon, with a unified memory controller and the optimizations that took place in 2012. He then mentioned that in 2013, some architectural integration will take place. There will be a unified address space for GPU and CPU, the GPU will use pageable system memory and CPU pointers, and explained that memory between the CPU and GPU will be fully coherent. The ultimate goal is to bring all of the processors in a system into unified, coherent memory.

Rogers’ presentation continued with some talk about the application areas with abundant parallel workloads. He talked about Natural UIs with touch, gesture, and voice, Biometric Recognition, and Augmented Reality, where graphics are superimposed and audio and other digital information is overlaid on an actual environment. He also talked about “content everywhere”, streaming media, and other areas that could benefit from heterogeneous processing.

Heterogeneous System Architecture Roadmap

The keynote continued with a facial recognition demo and some talk about how complex the algorithms are to actually detect a face in a HD image and the workloads associated with them. He then went on to talk about how in the vast majority of the test stages when doing facial recognition, a GPU has a huge performance advantage over a CPU, but that the CPU can be faster in some areas. The best solution is to leverage the GPU for some stages and the CPU for others, which is what heterogeneous computing is all about.

Tags: AMD, developers, Summit, Fusion, AFDS

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com