
What Is Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA)? - nkurz
http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/what-is-heterogeneous-system-architecture-hsa/
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fulafel
We're still waiting for the software side to shape up. Operating systems and
legacy driver stacks are slow to change, and OpenCL's decline (due to Apple's
disengagement) doesn't really help. There's stuff happening though, here's a
recent article about GCC 6 & HSA now that drivers are starting to arrive in
Linux: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=hsa-
offl...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=hsa-offloading-
gcc6-hopes)

Real world GPGPU applications are currently almost exclusively on CUDA, and
GPGPU programming language development seems stagnant. A return to the roots
(=games & consoles) for GPUs?

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valarauca1
This needs a (2012) label. HSA already happened, it didn't live up to the
hype.

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acaloiar
It's worth mentioning that while HSA specifically may or may not have lived up
to its "hype", it did succeed in being on of the first technologies (to my
knowledge) to provide hardware support for cache-coherent memory between
processing elements. This is an important concept to parallel computing
because there is significant latency involved in transferring data between CPU
and GPU RAM. HSA backs OpenCL 2.0's SVM (Shared Virtual Memory) and CUDA 6's
Unified Memory with actual hardware, making these APIs more than convenient
software abstractions.

Hardware unified memory opens up a whole new set of algorithms to GPU-
parallelization by removing the memory transfer latency barrier.

