AMD Details Next-Gen Kaveri APU's Shared Memory Architecture

crookedvulture writes "AMD has revealed more details about the unified memory architecture of its next-generation Kaveri APU. The chip's CPU and GPU components will have a shared address space and will also share both physical and virtual memory. GPU compute applications should be able to share data between the processor's CPU cores and graphics ALUs, and the caches on those components will be fully coherent. This so-called heterogeneous uniform memory access, or hUMA, supports configurations with either DDR3 or GDDR5 memory. It's also based entirely in hardware and should work with any operating system. Kaveri is due later this year and will also have updated Steamroller CPU cores and a GPU based on the current Graphics Core Next architecture." bigwophh writes links to the Hot Hardware take on the story, and writes "AMD claims that programming for hUMA-enabled platforms should ease software development and potentially lower development costs as well. The technology is supported by mainstream programming languages like Python, C++, and Java, and should allow developers to more simply code for a particular compute resource with no need for special APIs."

Comments

Re:Why compromise?

[SenatorPerry]

In OpenCL you need to copy items from the system memory to the GPU's memory and then load the kernel on the GPU to start execution. Then you must copy the data back from the GPU's memory at the end after execution. AMD is saying that you can instead pass a pointer to the data in the main memory instead of actually making copies of the data.

This should reduce some of the memory shifting on the system and speed up OpenCL execution. It will also eliminate some of the memory constraints on OpenCL regarding what you can do on the GPU. On a larger scale it will open up some opportunities for optimizing work.