Category Archives: Newsflash

Sonics Joins HSA Foundation to Help Drive Open Standard for Next-Generation Heterogeneous Computing

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Sonics Joins HSA Foundation to Help Drive Open Standard for Next-Generation Heterogeneous Computing

Provides System IP to HSA Platform for Mobile and Cloud Computing

MILPITAS, Calif. – August 30, 2012 – Sonics, Inc.®, the leading supplier of system IP for cloud-scale SoCs, today announced that the company has joined the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation as a contributor member, collaborating with other major industry leaders to support the parallel computing efforts for next-generation heterogeneous processors. In June at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, major global technology leaders converged to announce the formation of the HSA Foundation that will help drive a unified, open industry standard architecture for heterogeneous processing, and build a strong heterogeneous compute ecosystem for the embedded, mobile and cloud computing markets.
As a contributor member, Sonics will assist with research and development, participate in and contribute extensively to the work groups, gain early access to specifications and be well positioned to provide system IP to semiconductor companies building SoCs that adopt the HSA architecture by ensuring Sonics’ products are specification-compliant. Sonics will also collaborate with the members of the HSA Foundation to help advance a common specification for CPU (central processing units) and GPU (graphics processing units) interaction, drive a single architecture specification and simplify the programming model so software developers can leverage the capabilities found in modern CPUs and GPUs.
“Sonics addition to the HSA Foundation offers system IP support that will accelerate the development of a new class of heterogeneous processors,” said Greg Stoner, vice president and managing director of the HSA Foundation. “HSA is built on technological leadership and innovation from companies like Sonics that are creating unique experiences defined by a higher level of compute power and efficiency.”
“Sonics is excited to be part of such a progressive industry consortium that is helping to define the next level of computing innovation with a standard platform across the mobile and cloud computing markets,” said Jack Browne, vice president of marketing for Sonics. “With our leadership in scalable SoC architectural designs, commanding systems expertise and driving system IP into cloud-connected devices, Sonics’ is well positioned to provide semiconductor companies with the new level of performance and design proficiency needed to fuel tomorrow’s devices that will define the consumer’s computing experience.”
About the HSA Foundation
The HSA Foundation is a not-for-profit consortium for SoC IP vendors, OEMs, academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs whose goal is to make it easy to program for parallel computing. HSA members are building a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, and support for a diverse set of high-level programming languages, thereby creating the next foundation in general purpose computing. Learn more about HSA and the HSA Foundation at www.hsafoundation.com.
About Sonics
Sonics, Inc. is the leader of system IP for cloud-scale SoCs. As a pioneer of network-on-chip (NoC) technology, Sonics offers SoC designers one of the world’s largest portfolios of system IP for mobile, digital entertainment, wireless and home networking. With a broad array of silicon-proven IP, Sonics helps designers eliminate memory bottlenecks associated with complex, high-speed SoC design, streamline and unify data flows and solve persistent network challenges in embedded systems with multiple cores. Sonics has more than 110 patent properties to date and has enabled its customers to ship more than one billion chips worldwide. Founded in 1996, Sonics is headquartered in Milpitas, Calif. with offices worldwide. For more information, please visit www.sonicsinc.com, www.sonicsinc.com/blog, and follow us on twitter at twitter.com/sonicsinc.

Vivante joins the HSA Foundation as a Member

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Vivante Joins Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation to Transform Next Generation Mobile and Embedded Hybrid Compute Platforms

Vivante GC cores unleash new compute and graphics capabilities to accelerate platform performance in computer vision, sensor fusion, gesture, image processing, AR, and 3D/GPGPU

August 20th, 2012 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Aug. 20, 2012 – Vivante Corporation, a world-wide leader in graphics and GPU Compute technologies for handheld, consumer, and embedded devices, today announced it has joined the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation to push forward innovations in mobile and embedded GPU computing. The goal of HSA is to create a single architecture specification and standard application programming interface (API) that developers can easily adopt to optimize distributed workloads across the GPU and CPU, for the best performance and power efficiency.
Vivante products targeting hybrid platforms and designed to work directly with the CPU through a unified memory system will use ACE-Lite™ cache coherency or a native stream interface. The Vivante HSA design will be built on a unified software and hardware package that provides a single architecture spanning multiple operating systems and platforms. Vivante HSA software will be backwards compatibility with all existing compute-enabled products and built around HSA APIs and tools that complement our existing support of OpenCL™, Google Renderscript™, and Microsoft® DirectCompute™. By simplifying the lives of application developers targeting heterogeneous architectures, programmers can create breakthrough use cases that take advantage of the new paradigm shift to hybrid computing. Real world applications that are already being accelerated by Vivante cores include computer vision, image processing, augmented reality, sensor fusion, and motion processing.
“We welcome Vivante to the HSA Foundation as a valued member of our consortium of technology leaders driving the next generation of heterogeneous computing platforms,” said Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow. “Vivante’s products and technologies will enhance HSA and help expand its footprint into a wide range of markets, bringing new capabilities of hybrid systems to Vivante’s customers.”
“Vivante is excited to join HSA Foundation as a technology contributor defining the next era of innovation built on heterogeneous computing,” said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante. “We are already one of the industry leaders in mobile and embedded GPU and Compute technologies – currently the only company with mass market GPU IP that pass OpenCL 1.1 conformance and the only company that has partners shipping OpenGL ES 3.0 silicon. We look forward to collaborating with the consortium to define the next generation architecture for smartphones, tablets, TV/STB, embedded, networking, cloud computing, and automotive.”
 
About the HSA Foundation
The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a not-for-profit consortium for SoC IP vendors, OEMs, academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs whose goal is to make it easy to program for parallel computing. HSA members are building a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, and support for a diverse set of high-level programing languages, thereby creating the next foundation in general purpose computing. Please go to www.hsafoundation.com for more information.
About Vivante Corporation
Vivante Corporation, a leader in multi-core GPU, OpenCL™, and 2D Composition IP solutions, provides the highest performance and lowest power characteristics across a range of Khronos™ Group API conformant standards based on the ScalarMorphic™ architecture. Vivante GPUs are integrated into customer silicon solutions in mass market products including smartphones, tablets, HDTVs, consumer electronics and embedded devices, running thousands of graphics applications across multiple operating systems and software platforms. Vivante is a privately held company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with additional R&D centers in Shanghai and Chengdu. For more information, visit http://www.vivantecorp.com.

HSA Foundation President to Deliver Opening Day Keynote at IFA 2012

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HSA Foundation President to Deliver Opening Day Keynote at IFA 2012

– Phil Rogers to reveal the next era of computing innovation –

AUSTIN, Texas – Aug. 29, 2012 – The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation today announced that Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow, is one of two featured keynote speakers on opening day of IFA 2012, Friday, Aug. 31. Phil’s keynote titled, “The Next Era of Computing Innovation,” will examine the rapidly evolving computing and consumer electronics markets and show how new technologies are rapidly changing the way users interact with their electronics.
From the use of gestures to augmented reality and biometric recognition to the ever expanding video-centric world that we live in, this keynote will not just ask audience members to imagine a place, but will show them innovative applications that are available today as well as what’s coming. The HSA Foundation invites IFA 2012 attendees to join Phil and other industry leaders in the International Keynote Area, Hall 6.3 on Friday from 3:00 to 3:45 p.m.
Supporting Resources

About the HSA Foundation  
The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a not-for-profit consortium for SoC IP vendors, OEMs, academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs whose goal is to make it easy to program for parallel computing. HSA members are building a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, and support for a diverse set of high-level programming languages, thereby creating the next foundation in general purpose computing. Learn more about HSA and the HSA Foundation at www.hsafoundation.com.

HSA Represents The Evolution of Computing

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  • HSA Represents The Evolution of Computing

    The announcement of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation in June sparked an enormous amount of interest in HSA and what it means to the tech industry.  HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, and support for a diverse set of high-level programming languages, thereby creating the next foundation in general purpose computing.  More simply, HSA represents the latest step in an evolution that began roughly five years ago when the computing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) began to exceed that of the central processing unit (CPU).  Pure computing power, though, is not the only variable that matters in an overall computing experience, so HSA represents a lot more.
    Let me explain:  It turns out that a CPU is excellent in serial computations (solving a problem one piece at a time) and the GPU is excellent in parallel computations (dividing a problem into smaller ones and solving them simultaneously).  Other “hardwired” processing engines might do a single thing very well, like encoding / decoding of video or managing system security.  HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, and support for a diverse set of high-level programming languages, thereby creating the next foundation in general purpose computing
    With this understanding that different types of computation are best performed with different compute resources, let’s see what the future of computing might look like with HSA.
    AMD solved the first half of the equation for leveraging the GPU and CPU by putting them together on a single-chip called an accelerated processing unit, or APU. Being on the same chip allows computationally intensive tasks to be divided between the compute resources more efficiently, providing a better application experience to the end user.  To ensure users see a net benefit, software developers want the hardware to appear as a single processing unit – HSA is conceived to ensure there is no data transfer, thus eliminating delay while ensuring use by the appropriate resource.  This is where the relatively new programming models using DirectCompute, C++ AMP and OpenCL™ can help.
    Let’s take a quick look at each:
    DirectCompute: Part of Microsoft’s DirectX® collection of APIs, DirectCompute lets GPUs (whether on an APU or discrete) perform general computing parallel tasks beyond traditional graphics rendering and video processing.
    OpenCL™: Stands for Open Compute Language, and is a programming framework which offers a computing language based on C as well as an API.  With OpenCL™ you can leverage CPUs, GPUs, APUs (or even other types of processors) to accelerate parallel computations, this provides dramatic speedup for computationally intensive applications that work across devices and architectures. My colleague, Mark Ireton, wrote a recent blog post going into more depth, and there are also video overviews available on the AMD website: http://tinyurl.com/yemb266
    C++ AMP: (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) is a programming model that uses C++ programming language to exploit data parallelism.
    Now let’s say you are a developer trying to create a software application. Three criteria that might be important to you are:

    • You want to create code that runs on as many platforms as possible
    • You don’t want to learn new programming languages, or models
    • You want your code to be optimized so to run as fast and efficiently as possible

    DirectCompute, OpenCL™, and C++ AMP will all have various levels of success as development platforms for the above goals. For example DirectCompute is based on a Higher Level Shader Language (HLSL) which means that the number of developers that can use it is somewhat restricted, not to mention it is limited on which hardware supports it. OpenCL™ on the other hand is quite low level and could be more challenging for a C programmer than C++ AMP would be.
    Beyond the software programming model, HSA is also very closely tied to changes in hardware.  For AMD, making the GPU a true peer processor to the CPU with direct access by software is the ultimate goal.  Today, select AMD products feature C++ support for GPU Compute, IOMMUv2 (GPU can share system memory efficiently), and Bi-Directional Power Management between the CPU and the GPU. In the near future, memory efficiency will be improved because of: unified address space for CPU and GPU where the GPU uses pageable system memory via CPU pointers (i.e. GPU can have more memory by using virtual memory), and full coherent memory between CPU and GPU. Shortly after, we get to a GPU that looks more like the CPU through features such as GPU compute context switch, GPU graphics pre-emption (to allow critical applications to get access to the GPU with the lowest latency possible), and quality of service (proper prioritization of tasks).
    In conclusion, HSA takes a comprehensive view of computing architecture by defining the key elements hardware, software and programming languages so that the whole system is more efficient, powerful and easily accessible by mainstream programmers. AMD is committed to building HSA into its products, but we are also committed to sharing the basic architecture specifications and interfaces openly.  More information on how this will be accomplished is available from the HSA Foundation: www.hsafoundation.com

    Terry Makedon is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

AFDS Was Great Turn Out for Launch of the HSA Foundation

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We had a great turn out for the launch of HSA Foundation.  Also the HSA Foundation received some amazing feedback  from the press and analyst around the formation of HSA Foundation.  Most importantly we have had a very positive reception from industry and developer we really working on right problems and solving critical issue in today’s system..
Tom Malloy’s presentation really set up the day  with the need to address key issue in the system, drivers, and runtime to make it easier for broader class of programers to be able to solve the real problem and not get encumbared in bit banging the system for maximum performance. Phil Roger went back this year to look at real example where HSA can truely bring new levels of performance as well as performance per joule efficiency.
It is great to know  we are helping to bring better products to market that drive new levels of experience.  With HSA Foundation partners it will be ready from Deeply embedded systems, Smartphones,Tablets,Laptop, Desktops and Servers,  and will even scale all the way up to  HPC class Exaflop clusters.

  • The IP catalog they have available with the five founders is borderline staggering, and it will only get bigger. If the HSA Foundation hasn’t gotten a critical mass of coder interest too, it will soon. From here, it looks like AMD did the right thing for the right reason, don’t underestimate this one. – Charlie Demerjian, SemiAccurate
  • We have much more the learn about the HSA Foundation and its direction for the industry but we can easily say that this is probably the most important processor company collaboration announcement in many years. – Ryan Shrout, PC Perspective

Foundation Blasts Off

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HSA Foundation is now in flight and already locked on target.

One year ago Phil Roger stood up at AFDS and stated he wanted to change 30 years of PC Architecture legacy,  truly address the core chalanges in getting heterogeneous paralallel computing to be approachable by all programers.  On top of this he told the Audience AMD wanted to make the specification for this open.
Roll one year forward, AMD worked with ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, and Texas Instruments  to establish the HSA Foundation.  We are all interested in solving similar issues around moving computing platform forward in mobile devices, Tablets, Laptops, Workstation, and Servers.   On the anniversary of 2011 AFDS, the team has achieved it goal of bring your truly open specifications around HSA technology via the HSA foundation. Which has very solid team  of passionate people and founding companies who will drive this capabilities forward into market.

We look forward to working with all of you around this exciting new initiative.

ARM Mali GPUs at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit

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I am excited to be speaking at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. I shall be speaking, but in a talk that is not listed as part of the agenda, but as part of one of the keynote talks. As many of you may know, my appearance last year generated a lot of speculation about the nature of the relationship between ARM and AMD. I gave a talk about the things that the two companies agreed on rather than what we disagreed on. Mostly I talked about OpenCL and the importance of open standards going forward, and how that related to heterogeneous compute systems.
This year, we have a great deal to discuss. ARM is all about low power and many people in the industry now realize that GPUs have a central role to play in providing highly energy-efficient computing. It’s an exciting future that can grow the ecosystem that surrounds computing. ARM’s unique portfolio of CPU, GPU, interconnect and physical IP puts us at the forefront of one of the most important technological changes in a long time. Reflecting on that and some of those changes, I will be making an announcement at the show.
I wonder what we will do together as a result of these momentous changes in the industry? It promises to be an exciting year ahead as the ecosystem will be strengthened even further.
Leave a comment on this blog. Tweet me @ARMMultimedia. Leave a note on the ARM Facebook page with your questions for me?
Jem is an ARM Fellow and likes to think of himself as “The Godfather” to technical talent in ARM. After spending some time in his youth writing software for satellites and traffic-lights among other fascinating things, Jem spotted the technical inflection point of the mobile industry: graphics, video and other visual computing. As VP of technology in the Media Processing Division of ARM, Jem is busy with a lot of projects involving the future of cool ARM technology, which will revolutionise how people experience and interact with digital devices.

AFDS: Key Presentations To Go Deeper Into What Is HSA

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AFDS Keynotes

  • Phil Rogers, corporate fellow, AMD: “The Programmer’s Guide to a Universe of Possibility”
  • Tom Malloy, senior vice president & chief software architect, Advanced Technology Labs, Adobe Systems Incorporated: “The Promise of Parallel: Today’s State of Heterogeneous Computing”
  • Dr. Amr Awadallah, co-founder and CTO, Cloudera: “Apache Hadoop: The Modern Data Operating System”
  • Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer, AMD: “Heterogeneous Computing: The Market. The Roadmap”

AFDS Presentations

  • IOMMUv2: The Ins and Outs of the Heterogeneous GPU Use
  • GPGPU algorithms:  How Heterogeneous System Architecture can be leveraged to optimize such algorithms in video games
  • Accelerating SURF on HSA
  • Bolt: A C++ Template Library for HSA
  • An overview of HSAIL
  • HSA From A HPC Usage Perspective
  • HSA Memory and Execution Model à la HSA Runtime