AMD Outlines HSA Roadmap: Unified Memory for CPU/GPU in 2013, HSA GPUs in 2014

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/2/2012 12:44:00 PM
Posted in CPUs , APUs , GPUs , AMD , AMD FAD 2012

AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster just put up this slide that shows its HSA (Heterogeneous Systems Architecture) roadmap through 2014. This year we got Graphics Core Next, but next year we'll see a unified address space that both AMD CPUs and GPUs can access (today CPUs and GPUs mostly store separate copies of data in separate memory spaces). In 2014 AMD plans to deliver HSA compatible GPUs that allow for true heterogeneous computing where workloads will run, seamlessly, on both CPUs and GPUs in parallel. The latter is something we've been waiting on for years now but AMD seems committed to delivering it in a major way in just two years. 

Print This Article 8 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Xbox360 by philbotimus on Thursday, February 02, 2012 ... was ahead of it's time. philbotimus Reply RE: Xbox360 by tipoo on Thursday, February 02, 2012 This seems obvious for cost reduction, but it remains to be seen if the unified memory wont constrain performance in some way. For low end integrated chips sure, but for what they are going for with truly hybridized chips its going to require gobs of bandwidth and low latencies. tipoo Reply RE: Xbox360 by MrSpadge on Thursday, February 02, 2012 Unified logically doesn't have to mean unified physically. Think of NUMA with heterogenous nodes. MrSpadge Reply RE: Xbox360 by tipoo on Thursday, February 02, 2012 Hmm I see what you mean. That would be interesting. tipoo Reply RE: Xbox360 by Morg. on Monday, February 06, 2012 Well I believe main memory systems have been lagging behind for a while now, it would make sense to see DDR5 on the CPU's, especially when moving to APU's and UPU's and shared memory space.

In the end, the GPU will end up inside of the CPU anyway, like all PU's before, and as that drives up the need for non-crappy-memory-bandwidth, fat chance that main memory systems will come closer to what's available for GPU's today - probably in a tiered way such as :

CPU - L0 - L1 - L2 - L3 - DDR5/6 - DDR3/4 - NAND - HDD Morg. Reply Actually it's likely to improve performance by Beenthere on Thursday, February 02, 2012 Being able to use all available CPU/GPU performance at any time for any needs is likely to improve system performance. This is AMD moving forward with better ideas and use of all available computing power. Beenthere Reply The integrated future by Azethoth on Thursday, February 02, 2012 It seems like going forward the big trend is more and more software implemented in the CPU/gpu and the differences between those two disappear as well.

Gpu led the way by implementing graphics this way. Now intel adds encoding / decoding on chip. Peripheral control and networking crept on board as well. Sensors and wifi are probably not too far behind.

What else makes the on board grade? speech recognition? Maybe high level programming patterns like event handling?

I think multi core just doesn't cut it outside servers and some lucky algorithms that can leverage it. Azethoth Reply Blender Cycles limited by GPU memory - for how much longer? by R3MF on Friday, February 03, 2012 2012 - GPU can access CPU memory / 2013 Unified memory for CPU & GPU - which will deliver the holy grail of limitless memory for GPU compute in 3D rendering, i.e. using system memory while rendering 3D scenes on the graphics card via OpenCL? R3MF Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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