Heterogenous System Architecture
The Heterogeneous System Architecture ( HSA briefly, formerly Fusion System Architecture) is a concept developed by AMD processor, as efficiently as possible to unite central and graphics processor on a computer chip (die ) and thereby accelerate the execution of specialized programs. This will significantly increase, among other things, the overall performance of APUs ( Accelerated Processing Unit). The main feature of the HSA is that the CPU cores and the GPU to a common address space and memory ( RAM) access.
- 2.1 Characteristics
- 2.2 future
History
AMD announced the HSA program on the AFDS ( AMD Fusion Developer Summit ) in 2011, to accelerate immensely for the purpose of processing speed of various tasks. Due to trademark difficulties with Arctic (among other things known for CPU and GPU cooler ), AMD had to rename said program in HSA the then FSA ( Fusion System Architecture).
On the AFDS 2012 AMD announced the creation of the so-called HSA Foundation, wants to work with other smart developers on a common concept of HSA in AMD. Members of the HSA Foundation are among other ARM and Texas Instruments.
In the future, AMD plans in collaboration with ARM, the software industry more to persuade them to optimize their products to HSA and to bring any additional few hardware manufacturers on board.
Founder of the HSA Foundation
- AMD
- ARM
- Imagination
- Mediatek
- Qualcomm
- Samsung
- Texas Instruments
Technical
The concept of the HSA is that the graphics part of APUs by and large common tasks can take over ( GPGPU ) and thus may have an accelerating effect on specific arithmetic operations. Main feature is that the graphics unit with C and OpenCL is programmable.
The currently most advanced version of HSA in the desktop & notebook market and tablet market are Kaveri and Kabini and Temash APUs that can access a coherent memory and AMD's Huma technology dominate (previously only at Jaguar -based APUs ).
The GPU is used, as these can perform very well Gleitkommarechenoperationen quickly and efficiently with their parallel execution units. In contrast to normal CPU this offer namely much more floating-point units. Current CPUs have AMD only one floating point unit per module (AMD Bulldozer architecture) and Intel just a floating point unit per core ( Intel Sandy Bridge architecture ').
Features
The characteristics of a processor with HSA support are that the graphics processor and the main processor are combined on a computer chip. This facilitates the rapid exchange of data between the two units and thus can speed up tasks in software strong. Among other things, this reduces the complexity of motherboards, since there is no separate graphics chip, more needs to be soldered. Another important feature is that in the final stage of the graphics part has a coherent memory and shared address space and C and OpenCL is programmable. This AMD has already integrated in its Kaveri APUs with Graphics Core Next architecture graphics. Also chip shop on the HSA 3rd party IP components can integrate into their microchips. This is when the successor generation of the current low-power chips based on the Jaguar architecture already in planning. There, the ARM Trusted Zone will be integrated directly into the x86 chip, for example.
Future
AMD plans to various units of third parties such as ARM in their APUs add ( with additional ARM cores ) and thus the APU perfectly suit the intended use. The next stage of HSA, the Kaveri APUs will provide the coherent memory and a common address space of the CPU and GPU. You will be with 2-4 Steamroller ( successor to Piledriver ) cores and Graphics Core Next (newest generation of AMD graphics chip ) equipped graphics part. Sony announced in February 2013, to be used in its PlayStation 4 x86 processors with AMD's "Jaguar" as the CPU and Graphics Core Next as GPU architecture. These APUs are like Kaveri on the Bobcat replace the third stage of the HSA and are called Kabini or Temash in the low-end desktop and notebook market or in the tablet market, the current APUs based architecture.
Software
In software terms, HSA is already partially supported by major software companies such as Adobe, which can, for example, various features in Adobe Photoshop run via OpenCL for the graphics part. This is not only an advantage for an APU, but also for Intel, which can run on the GPU with its HD 2500 and HD4000 GPU OpenCL, as well as Nvidia with their graphics cards. Behind the unit but compared with NVIDIA's own CUDA development. It is also planned by the PGI ( The Portland Group) to develop a corresponding HSA compiler in partnership AMD, with which one can without much fault of their own compile programs that are accelerated by the HSA extensions.
Processors with HSA support
- AMD Bulldozer Kaveri (since January 14, 2014 )
- Playstation 4 SoC