Unified Heterogeneous Computing Arrives

2013年11月11日

amd's2013 Developer Summit in full swing where the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Accelerated Processing Units (APU) are center stage.

William G. Wong

amd's2013 Developer Summit is off to a bang with chips, SDKs and architectures. The Kaveri(Fig. 1)Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) implements AMD’s Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). HSA delivers heterogeneous unified memory access (hUMA)so CPUs and GPUs share the same virtual address space. It means that data does not have to be copied between CPU and GPU accessible memory as is required with most CPU/GPU environments.

Figure 1. AMD’s Kaveri APU implements the Heterogeneous System Architecture that unifies the memory and scheduling of the on-chip CPUs and GPUs.

新的APU提供总体（异构排队）支持(Fig. 2). The hQ allows CPU and GPU applications to schedule new GPU jobs directly. Combined with hUMA, hQ delivers significant efficiencies compared to isolated CPU/GPU architectures.

Figure 2. The hQ architecture allows multiple GPU task queues that can be fed from CPU or GPU applications.

The GPU takes up 47% of the 28 nm Kaveri chips. That is a big chunk of space for the GPU but this delivers performance that used to be found only on dedicated GPU platforms. AMD will still be delivering dedicated GPU chips and boards like the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card(Fig. 3). It uses AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture to deliver UltraHD 4K display support. It also uses AMD’s TrueAudio technology.

Figure 3. AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card is designed to drive UltraHD 4K displays at high frame rates.

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The PCI Express board has 2560 947 MHZ stream processing units. The 4 Gbytes of GDDR5 memory run at 5.0 Gbit/s delivering a memory bandwidth of 320 Gbytes/s. The system provides single precision computing power of 4.85 TFLOPS.

除DirectX和OpenGL之外，Radeon R9 290以及APU将支撑地幔。Mantle针对游戏应用程序，但仍有待观察Mantle是否可以取代DirectX这样的其他框架，或者是否将在索尼的PS4等游戏平台上使用。

AMD App SDK 2.9提供对新APU中的HSA的支持。它包括支持像螺栓C ++模板库，OpenCV和Clmath等开源库的支持。媒体SDK在测试版中。最新的Codexl Tool Suite现在支持Java和远程调试。它还具有CPU和GPU分析器，GPU调试器支持和用于OpenCL的静态内核分析器。

Java是HSA公告的一大部分。Java 7 OpenCL支持使用Ararapi。它不需要程序员学习OpenCl，尽管有并行编程成语用于开发并行应用程序。

HSA将与“柏林”APU同时进入服务器空间(Fig. 4). It is part of the Opteron X series. It targets web and enterprise clusters. It is available in 2013 and will be available on platforms likeHewlett-PackardsMoonshot。

图4. AMD的“柏林”处理器为服务器空间带来APU技术。

I am the AMD Developer Summit now and hope to find out more about the HSAIL virtual machine. HSAIL is the APU GPU software interface. The HSAIL Finalizer generates GPU code from the HSAIL bytecode stream generated from compilers like LLVM.

The HSA APU is in its infancy. AMD is now delivering the first pass of software that will radically change how programmers take advantage of the GPU. This is just the beginning.