AMD Bets the Farm on CPU-GPU Integration Strategy
AMD's future Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) will start appearing in AMD products in 2013,
AMD is working to make its next-generation architecture an open industry standard for the developer community. Rather than attach its own branding to HSA, the company says it wants to make it clear as day that this is an open platform, even if the new architecture actually fuses x86 cores with its graphics technology more than ever before.
"If you truly want to make something stick, you have to build the entire ecosystem around it," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Global Business Units. "HSA is really trying to bring the software ecosystem together with the hardware ecosystem. It's a big step and it will take a lot of energy across the industry, but we feel it's the right thing to do."
Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights and Strategy, called HSA a "swing for the fences move." "If they hit," he said, "they hit big, because there's nobody who can pull these two [processor technologies] together other than AMD."
Chips based on the Heterogeneous System Architecture will be a lot more than just a CPU slapped next to a GPU. The first graphics chips with very early HSA capabilities are supposed to come out this year but the HSA party really gets started in 2013.
That's when AMD plans to release a pair of APUs code named Kaberi and Kavini that will sport a CPU-GPU combo that shares a unified memory cache. Those chips will also feature unified address space for the CPU and GPU components, the latter of which will use pageable system memory via CPU pointers.
In 2014, AMD intends to take HSA from the architectural integration stage to the system integration stage. In simple terms, that means computers that will know how to throttle up the CPU portion of the APU that runs them and dial down the graphics component for scalar processing tasks, while doing the opposite for parallel processing work that's more suited to the GPU.
And the following supports AMD wanting Game consoles to use the AMD APU and HSA which they are supporting with OpenCL and C++ compiler libraries.
Still, HSA's viability is chained to AMD's ability to nurture and grow a dedicated developer ecosystem around it, he warned. "If it doesn't work out, what you're left with is this amazing hardware platform without software and applications to take advantage of it," Moorhead said.
I'd guess Sony and possibly Microsoft ("there's nobody who can pull these two [processor technologies] together other than AMD") got a really really good deal on HSA APUs. Just need some really fast memory.
AMD supplied PDF showing features in APU chipset with MANY future game console related must have features Carefully read all features!!!!!!
Display port 1.2 => Can direct drive head mounted display or glasses, inexpensive DP to HDMI adaptors available.
USB 3.0
Low power idle AMD Zero core power technology
DISCRETE DIGITAL MULTI-POINT AUDIO Audio The first GPUs that can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams
Infinity view with multiple monitors
AMD “TRINITY” DOCKING SOLUTION – ONE CABLE, MANY BENEFITS
 Single cable – Mini-DisplayPort Connector
 Four simultaneous displays
 Blu-ray protected content
 GPU acceleration
 3D stereoscopic capable
 Full bandwidth USB 3.0
 Dock powers notebook
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 Cross-platform compatible
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 Targeted 2H12 production*
200+ apps including:
 Sony Vegas™ Pro 11 is one of the top video
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 Vegas™ Pro 11 features OpenCL™ GPU
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BlueStacks runs all your favorite Android apps on
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 AMD announced investment in BlueStacks as
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 BlueStacks App Player being optimized for AMD
VISION Technology
AMD HSA PDF
COMMITTED TO OPEN STANDARDS
 AMD drives open standards
 Compete on the best implementation
 Open standards are the basis for large ecosystems
 Open standards always win over time
 SW developers want their applications to run on multiple platforms from multiple hardware vendors
HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE – AN OPEN PLATFORM
Open Architecture, published specifications
 HSAIL virtual ISA
 HSA memory model
 HSA system specification
ISA agnostic for both CPU and GPU
Inviting partners to join us, in all areas
 Hardware companies
 Operating Systems
 Tools and Middleware
 Applications
HSA Foundation to guide the architecture
MAKE GPUs EASIER TO PROGRAM: PRIMARY PROGRAMMING MODELS
Khronos OpenCL™
 Premier programming environment for heterogeneous computing today
 AMD is a key contributor to OpenCL™ at Khronos
 HSA features and architecture make OpenCL™ more efficient
 May initially enable some HSA features with extensions
Microsoft®C++AMP
 Integrated in Visual Studio and Windows®8 Metro
 Addresses the huge population of Visual Studio developers
 Elegant extension of C++ through two new keywords: “restrict”, “array_view”
 HSA provides a natural roadmap for relaxing “restrict” and using all of C++
OPENCL™– WHAT IS IT?
 OpenCL™– Open Compute Language
 Industry standard programming language for parallel computing
 Specification by Khronos (Open, royalty-free like OpenGL™

 Provides a unified programming model for CPUs, GPUs, Smart Phones, Tablets, Servers (Cloud)…

Allows software devs to write software once, runs cross-platform
 Supported by all major hardware & software vendors
 AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, ARM, Imagination Technologies, etc
OPENCL™ AND HSA
 HSA is an optimized platform architecture for OpenCL™
 Not an alternative to OpenCL™
 OpenCL™ on HSA will benefit from
 Avoidance of wasteful copies
 Low latency dispatch
 Improved memory model
 Pointers shared between CPU and GPU
 HSA also exposes a lower level programming interface, for those that want the ultimate in control and performance
 Optimized libraries may choose the lower level interface