HSA Foundation Formed By AMD, ARM, Ti, Imagination, and MediaTek

New submitter Phopojijo writes "To wrap up his 'Programmers Guide to a Universe of Possibility' keynote during the 2012 AMD Fusion Developer Summit, Phil Rogers of AMD announced the establishment of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation. The foundation has been instituted to create and maintain open standards to ease programming for a wide variety of processing resources including discrete and integrated GPUs. Founding members include ARM, Texas Instruments, Imagination, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, as well as AMD. Parallels can be drawn between this and AMD's 'virtual gorilla' initiative back from the late 1990s."

Comments

Ti

[Anonymous Coward]

But tell me, does it include Texas Instruments?

Re:Ti

[Phopojijo]

Samsung is a big developer of processors and one of the world's few FABs actually. ((I actually forgot to mention Qualcomm as an absentee for some reason -- they're a big no-show too.)) Though Apple, I agree, is little love lost. They design chips... but barely; they would not really contribute much to this arrangement; and if they sink by excluding themselves then it will only be them to be hurt in that deal.

Re:Ti

[CAIMLAS]

Add to the list Motorola. Though, really, Samsung and Motorola are 'just' big (good) hardware intigrators, as opposed to being instigators of the actual core technologies. But if TI has signed on, I think they should certainly consider it.

Apple? Most certainly they should be off the list, if for no other reason than the fact that they design their x86 hardware to not be fully compatible with other common x86 systems (thinking of their UEFI), seemingly for the sake of being different...

Re:Ti

[Tanktalus]

That's okay. That's what /. has editors for.

Re:Ti

[Barefoot Monkey]

http://www.khronos.org/news/press/2008/06

The Compute Working Group will follow proven Khronos processes and invite member contributions as a basis for standardization efforts. Apple has proposed the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification to enable any application to tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU and CPU resources through an approachable C-based language.

Of course, "proposed" can mean different things, but it looks like Apple made the first draft.

Me like

[rrohbeck]

AMD needs to get on the ARM bandwagon. I want an APU with an integrated ARM core that works as a service processor and low power auxiliary CPU when the big CPU is powered off. Good enough for email and browsing and if the GPU has good power management the battery should last forever.

Re:What we programmer needs ...

[Phopojijo]

The ironic part is that an X86 instruction hasn't been mapped to dedicated hardware for decades. It just signals a series of micro-ops to perform the calculation.

That started back when we were still doing most of our applications in assembly... and people were begging Intel for the most arbitrary of operations in-silicon.

Then of course when we switched to compilers only about 10% of those operations were used 90% of the time... which is why ARM got so efficient and cheap... because they built their committee around that Turing-complete small set of instructions that compilers would most likely use... rather than Intel's obfuscation to make assembly programmers not want to light themselves up in a gas fire.

So I guess... sort of a bad example?

Re:And what is the point?

[rrhal]

From TFA (emphasis mine)

The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a not-for-profit consortium for SoC IP vendors, OEMs, academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs whose goal is to make it easy to program for parallel computing. HSA members are building a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, and support for a diverse set of high-level programming languages, thereby creating the next foundation in general purpose computing.

One click in:

Members of the HSA Foundation plan to deliver robust development solutions for heterogeneous compute to drive innovative content and applications with developer tools, software developer kits (SDKs), libraries, documentation, training, support and more.

Basically they are going to maintain a set of open standards for platforms that allow programmers to integrate code that runs on the GPU with code that runs on the CPU's.