LONDON – Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and several collaborators have used the AMD Fusion Developer Summit being held in Bellevue, Washington, to announce the formation of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation.
AMD, ARM, Imagination, MediaTek and Texas Instruments are the initial founding members of a non-profit consortium that has been established to define and promote an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing that will provide a common hardware specification and support to make it easier for software developers to take multiprocessing advantage of modern complex processors.
The development fits in with the announcement made at the same event one year ago that AMD's Fusion chip architecture would be agnostic to the types CPU and GPU cores used for its implementation (see
Why AMD is opening up Fusion: CPU, GPU cores are the new gates).
The five founding companies – which have expertise in x86 and ARM CPUs and PowerVR and Mali GPU cores amongst others – have pledged to work together to drive a single architecture specification that will simplify the programming model to help software developers take greater advantage of the capabilities found in the multiple CPU and GPU cores integrated in chips and unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in heterogeneous processors.
The heterogeneous processor market, also known as the hybrid processor market, is reckoned to be worth $55.5 billion and has particular relevance in such areas as cloud-based data management, streaming, and security.
"HSA moves the industry beyond the constraints of the legacy system architecture of the past 25-plus years that is now stifling software innovations," said Phil Rogers, AMD Corporate Fellow and HSA Foundation President, in a statement. "By aiming HSA squarely at the needs of the software developer, we have designed a common hardware platform for high performance, energy efficient solutions. HSA is unlocking a new realm of possibilities across PCs, smartphones, tablets and ultrathin notebooks, as well as the innovative supercomputers and cloud services that define the modern computing experience."
The HSA is open to any and all computing industry professionals including semiconductor companies, platform and OS vendors, device manufacturers, independent software vendors, academia and open source developers. The foundation expects to deliver developer tools, software developer kits (SDKs), libraries, documentation, training and support.
Related links and articles:
www.hsafoundation.com
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