Items tagged with HSA
The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation is making waves this week with the announcement of the HSA Specification v1.0. The HSA 1.0 spec is aimed at ushering in a new wave of heterogeneous computing devices that efficiently harness the power of both CPUs and GPUs. HSA is not only destined to impact high-performance computing (HPC) and desktop platforms — as one would expect — it will also impact mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. HSA will make it easier for programmers to “efficiently apply the hardware resources in today’s complex systems-on-chip (SOCs),” including tapping directly into the GPU. Through the use of “heterogeneous queuing,” GPUs will be...
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AMD's Future of Compute event was this week and the company has made a number of announcements regarding new technology and the future of its HSA, Mantle, and FreeSync projects. First up, there's Carrizo, AMD's upcoming follow-on to Kaveri and the first chip to use its "Excavator" CPU cores. AMD is projecting that both Carrizo and Carrizo-L will launch in the first half of 2015. Typically, for AMD, that means the May or June timeframe. The company hasn't said much about features or capabilities of these new parts, though its press release does note that Carrizo will support "4K experiences." OpenCL 2.0 and the official HSA 1.0 specification will both be baked into Carrizo. AMD is also claiming...
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AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack the datacenter, breaking the replication of resources and low volume, high-margin parts that have traditionally been Intel's bread-and-butter. We've known for months that AMD was working on its own ARM server core, but announcing imminent sampling means that the company is confident of shipping the part in fairly short order. The eight-core chip isn't HSA compatible -- it's not clear what GPU IP is used to provide a...
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Of all the rumors that swirled around Kaveri before the APU debuted last week, one of the more interesting bits was that AMD might debut GDDR5 as a desktop option. GDDR5 isn't bonded in sticks for easy motherboard socketing, and motherboard OEMs were unlikely to be interested in paying to solder 4-8GB of RAM directly on to their own motherboards to support AMD's chip. Such a move would shift the RMA responsibilities for RAM failures back to the board manufacturer. Given the limited upselling capabilities and low market share AMD currently enjoys, it seemed unlikely that Sunnyvale would consider such an option. A deep dive into Kaveri's technical documentation, however, shows that AMD did indeed...
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One of the greatest problems standing between companies like AMD and widespread adoption of the GPU as a mainstream accelerator is that it's extremely difficult to effectively leverage the GPU. Even after years of development poured into CUDA, OpenCL, and yes, HSA, the barriers between CPU and GPU have remained substantial. The reason why is simple, at a high level. The CPU was always designed as the Central Processing Unit. As years past, and more and more applications that were previously handled by specialized accelerators moved to the CPU, there was less and less need to treat any other processor in the system as a partner. AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture aims to reverse this, but...
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Earlier this summer, AMD launched its HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) foundation with a number of core partners. Now Samsung has joined the collaborative effort as well. This could be the beginning of an unprecedented level of cooperation between the APU designer and massive smartphone/tablet developer. The two companies already share certain technologies; Samsung and GlobalFoundries, AMD's chief manufacturing partner, are members of IBM's Common Platform Alliance. The HSA Foundation is a non-profit established to promote "an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing that will provide a common hardware specification and broad support ecosystem to make it easier for software...
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