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From 11 to 14 November this year, the association HSA Foundation, promises to present the first specifications for the implementation of software and hardware environment, focused on heterogeneous or, more simply, heterogeneous computing. The first practical experience of this strategy can be considered as GPGPU-payments when the hybrid processors started to combine graphical and non-graphical calculations. A further step in this direction would be the unification or separation of the total system memory between computational and graphics cores.
This is one of the main feature of the new APU AMD, which Sony just had to take advantage of in PlayStation 4.
AMD technology called unified access to memory abbreviation hUMA (heterogeneous uniform memory). Apart from custom APU, for the first time or full support hUMA unified memory will be implemented as part of APU Kaveri. These 28-nm solutions at 2 and 4 cores Steamroller promise to appear at the end of this year. A distinctive feature of Kaveri to the system memory will be the possibility of an independent and coherent treatment of the CPU and GPU to a shared pool of physical and virtual memory. In the APU for PlayStation 4 introduced internal bus for communication between the GPU, CPU and memory without going through the internal cache.
Memory paging will turn to virtual memory addresses that are not represented in the area of physical memory. In this case, the cache CPU and GPU in each time interval has an idea of free memory locations in order to avoid overlaps and other authorizations for the transfer of data.
The data remains in the same region of system memory where they finished processing the graphics processor. CPU is enough to ask for information at the same address, which, again, strikes out a bunch of intermediate steps of the process.
This technology will find the widest application, since it is already implemented in the architecture of Jaguar (APU PS 4). Barrier to hUMA and unified memory may be reluctant to work in tandem with AMD from Intel and NVIDIA. Microsoft has also taken a wait and see attitude, although joined the HSA Foundation. Related Products :
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