So what's the deal with ARM being part of the HSA group, yet being like: "ARM did not have too much to say on the matter, but has stated that they never “totally bought into” HSAIL." I'd like to hear more about that attitude and what it means for the future of HSA.
Sure. The following was just added to the G71 article.
---
With yesterday's announcement of the HSA 1.1 specification, I went back to ARM to ask them whether the new specification impacts the company’s heterogenous compute plans at all, especially given that their architecture doesn’t support the 1.0 standard. As it turns out, ARM is going a route very similar to AMD’s ROCm platform: while the company isn’t utilizing the HSAIL – and thus in the strictest sense isn’t a complete HSA platform – they are using the HSA standard in the development of their hardware.
At a hardware level, the HSA specification standardizes a number of aspects of the hardware for common interoperability and easier programming purposes, including signals, queues, floating point number handling, and other, low-level minutiae about how heterogeneous execution should work. This is separate from the HSAIL, which is more concerned with the software aspects of heterogeneous programming, and though helpful, is not necessary for heterogeneous compute. As a result while Mali-G71 is technically not an HSA platform, in practice it is HSA hardware, using the HSA specification as a means to offer a common and well understood execution model for heterogeneous compute. So ARM is very much on-board with HSA – and is essentially supplying one of the first non-AMD HSA 1.1 hardware designs – even if they’re not using HSAIL itself.
"being used as the basis of their Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm), where ROCm adds the additional discrete GPU functionality AMD specifically needs."
Underneath they essentially use HSA, with some additional functionality for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) - since dGPUs don't have physical locality - and better peer-to-peer communication.
I really wish Intel would embrace and push HSA. And put the "huge" percentage of their dies dedicated to GPUs to better use. Trying to use mine for OpenCL number crunching with limited success due to driver bugs.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
6 Comments
Back to Article
pogostick - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
So what's the deal with ARM being part of the HSA group, yet being like: "ARM did not have too much to say on the matter, but has stated that they never “totally bought into” HSAIL." I'd like to hear more about that attitude and what it means for the future of HSA.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Sure. The following was just added to the G71 article.---
With yesterday's announcement of the HSA 1.1 specification, I went back to ARM to ask them whether the new specification impacts the company’s heterogenous compute plans at all, especially given that their architecture doesn’t support the 1.0 standard. As it turns out, ARM is going a route very similar to AMD’s ROCm platform: while the company isn’t utilizing the HSAIL – and thus in the strictest sense isn’t a complete HSA platform – they are using the HSA standard in the development of their hardware.
At a hardware level, the HSA specification standardizes a number of aspects of the hardware for common interoperability and easier programming purposes, including signals, queues, floating point number handling, and other, low-level minutiae about how heterogeneous execution should work. This is separate from the HSAIL, which is more concerned with the software aspects of heterogeneous programming, and though helpful, is not necessary for heterogeneous compute. As a result while Mali-G71 is technically not an HSA platform, in practice it is HSA hardware, using the HSA specification as a means to offer a common and well understood execution model for heterogeneous compute. So ARM is very much on-board with HSA – and is essentially supplying one of the first non-AMD HSA 1.1 hardware designs – even if they’re not using HSAIL itself.
R3MF - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
"being used as the basis of their Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm), where ROCm adds the additional discrete GPU functionality AMD specifically needs."Please tell me more about HSA on discrete gpu's?
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
This is the project formally known as Boltzmann.http://www.anandtech.com/show/9792/amd-sc15-boltzm...
Underneath they essentially use HSA, with some additional functionality for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) - since dGPUs don't have physical locality - and better peer-to-peer communication.
http://gpuopen.com/rocm-do-you-speaka-my-language/
R3MF - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
thanks Ryan.does this have read-across into their consumer products?
MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
I really wish Intel would embrace and push HSA. And put the "huge" percentage of their dies dedicated to GPUs to better use. Trying to use mine for OpenCL number crunching with limited success due to driver bugs.