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selinz
Sounds like a reincarnation of the old Pascal Pcode concepts...
HSA close to setting hardware specs
Peter Clarke
3/18/2013 12:15 PM EDT
Evolution not revolution
When asked if the deliberations of HSA would drive the creation of new instruction set architectures and processor cores from Apple and others, Davies said indicated the impact would first be at the system level and in the interconnect around processing elements. So, for example, it could drive the creation of hardware interconnect that will conform to HSA guidelines; a son-of-AMBA interconnect standard.
"This is going to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. We're tweaking around the outside of the next Mali GPU, the next ARM CPU," said Davies. ARM has already got OpenCL programs running on Mali GPUs and Cortex CPUs said Davies, "but it’s a bit of a Ninja programming sport." He said the HSA Foundation has the goal of making this much easier.
Davies made the point that ARM's Mali-T600 family of GPUs already has many of the features that HSA is standardizing. These include support for 64-bit integer and floating-point arithmetic, page tables with 48-bit virtual addresses, GPU virtual addresses shadow CPU virtual addresses and GPU I/O is coherent with that of the CPU.
Future generations of GPU under development at ARM will allow GPUs to directly share CPU page tables, and make GPUs fully coherent with CPUs, Davies said.
AMD is expected to deliver HSA-compatible GPUs that will allow appropriate workloads to run on CPUs and GPUs in a parallel in 2014.
Click on image to enlarge.
The HSA solution stack. Source AMD
Related links and articles:
www.hsafoundation.org
News articles:
AMD eyes ARM IP, realignment
Qualcomm joins AMD's HSA club
AMD wants graphics processors to run Java
When asked if the deliberations of HSA would drive the creation of new instruction set architectures and processor cores from Apple and others, Davies said indicated the impact would first be at the system level and in the interconnect around processing elements. So, for example, it could drive the creation of hardware interconnect that will conform to HSA guidelines; a son-of-AMBA interconnect standard.
"This is going to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. We're tweaking around the outside of the next Mali GPU, the next ARM CPU," said Davies. ARM has already got OpenCL programs running on Mali GPUs and Cortex CPUs said Davies, "but it’s a bit of a Ninja programming sport." He said the HSA Foundation has the goal of making this much easier.
Davies made the point that ARM's Mali-T600 family of GPUs already has many of the features that HSA is standardizing. These include support for 64-bit integer and floating-point arithmetic, page tables with 48-bit virtual addresses, GPU virtual addresses shadow CPU virtual addresses and GPU I/O is coherent with that of the CPU.
Future generations of GPU under development at ARM will allow GPUs to directly share CPU page tables, and make GPUs fully coherent with CPUs, Davies said.
AMD is expected to deliver HSA-compatible GPUs that will allow appropriate workloads to run on CPUs and GPUs in a parallel in 2014.
Click on image to enlarge.
The HSA solution stack. Source AMD
Related links and articles:
www.hsafoundation.org
News articles:
AMD eyes ARM IP, realignment
Qualcomm joins AMD's HSA club
AMD wants graphics processors to run Java
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selinz
3/19/2013 1:49 PM EDT
Sounds like a reincarnation of the old Pascal Pcode concepts...
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