AMD has a continued focus on generic processing with its graphics circuits, and has now made powerful allies to achieve its goals. ARM teams up with AMD to form the HSA Foundation together with Texas Instruments, Imagination Technologies and MediaTek.
AMD FSA (Fusion System Architecture) was renamed HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) a while back when the company announced its new strategy to simplify programmning for graphics processors but also other kind of logic. HSA will be flexible in a way that will not only work with some architectures, but the idea is that it will work with circuits from all actors. Hardware optimized for HSA will of course work better and more efficiently than hardware that isn’t.
AMD and ARM has founded the HSA Foundation together. System processor actors Texas Instruments and MediaTek are also part of the venture, and Imagination Technologies that is behind the graphics architectures of the PowerVR family.
“The HSA Foundation is a non-profit consortium established to define and 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 developers to deliver innovative applications that can take greater advantage of today’s modern processors.”
The venture stretches much longer than software since they will develop data buses compatible with their common archtiectures. Above all it will make it easier for software developers to make applications that is accelerated by a graphics circuit and other form of acceleration logic in circuits.
AMD hopes that HSA will be the platform choice for everything from smartphones to the cloud, which include all product segment in the industry. ARM says that HSA is a natural fit for the company, since its partners integrate CPU and GPU in the same package. There is no doubt the joint venture with ARM and Texas Instruments is huge, since it increase the chances of HSA becoming an accepted standard in the industry.
Source: HSA Foundation, TomsHardware
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