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NVIDIA Jetson TX1 Performance Shines For GPU Computing (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Following last week's announcement of the Jetson TX1 development board, NVIDIA is now allowing independent reports of performance for their $599 USD 64-bit ARM development board. Linux results published by Phoronix show very strong performance for the Jetson TX1 when looking at the Cortex-A57 speed relative to the Tegra K1 and older Tegra SoCs along with other ARM hardware like Calxeda and Raspberry Pi. The Jetson TX1 was generally multiple times faster than ARM hardware a few years old. The graphics performance was twice as fast as the year-old Jetson TK1 thanks to the Maxwell GPU. Compared to x86 hardware, in CPU-bound tasks the performance is comparable to an AMD Sempron/Phenom except when utilizing GPGPU computing where it's then faster than Intel Skylake and Xeon processors. The Jetson TX1 had a peak power consumption of 16 Watts and an average power use of under 10 Watts.
The USP of AMD's APUs used to be having the GPU and the CPU on the same die.
No, it's much more than that. It's not just on the same die, it;s the same side of the MMU as the CPU and the same side of the cache. This means you can pass data back and forth between the two units with a latency measured in nanoseconds, because you can simply hand over a pointer in the same memory space. I believe HSA also specifies things like atomics which are consistent across the CPU and GPU, as well as synchronisation primitives.
In other words HSA is much more than just bolting a CPU and a GPU onto the same bus on a die.
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