I blogged before that I was going to speak at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. Yesterday in Bellevue I announced that ARM was joining the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation as a founder member. There's also a video of me here. The HSA Foundation is an independent, non-profit consortium, and is open to any and all computing industry professionals with an interest in driving the next era in computing performance and energy efficiency. The purpose of the HSA Foundation is to drive the standardization of GPU programming and promote the published HSA specifications to help developers code easily and cost effectively.
ARM continues to drive industry with its vision of heterogeneous computing
ARM has worked closely with AMD since early 2011 helping define the HSA specifications and the formation of the Foundation. We brought our technical expertise in software, CPU, GPU and memory system architecture to bear on the specifications, and they now match our vision. We also brought our expertise and 21 years of experience in forming partnerships to help form the Foundation. As the only IP company with a full portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, system architecture components and physical IP we bring a unique view point to the discussions and drive towards a standard vision of low-power computing, utilising the right compute devices for the right tasks in an architecture for the digital world.
When we developed ASTC: a new industry standard for texture compression in graphics, AMD collaborated with us and contributed some IP to the standard that helped it to become the best texture compression method today and helped it become a great, open standard. During that collaboration I was reminded of the best of the values of the ARM partnership - that together we can achieve truly remarkable things. ARM is a strong believer in standards and we have both set, and contributed to, many of the most important standards that enable our industry today. We believe that HSA can become equally important in furthering our focus of energy-efficient computing.
ARM's technical leadership in the IP industry became clear when we announced the ARM Mali™-T604 GPU: it already had many of the features that are absolutely essential to utilise heterogeneous computing - we had memory coherence, page table formats shared with the ARM Cortex™ processors and ready for ARMv8 64-bit CPUs. Our highly compute-capable GPU supported all the data formats (including a full range of 64-bit arithmetic including double-precision floating point) necessary to be a first-class citizen in a system shared with ARM CPUs, supporting full precision, IEEE-754 2008 behaviours and all the features needed to support Full Profile OpenCL™and Microsoft® DirectCompute.
Mali-T604 was the first member of the Midgard architecture, and is already silicon-proven. We had the first silicon in October last year and production silicon is available now from our partners, it is ready to take its place in a world of heterogeneous computing. The other members of the Mali-T600 family that have since been announced and our roadmap of future Midgard GPUs continues to lead the industry towards our vision of heterogeneous computing systems, and the HSA Foundation is part of that vision.
What do you think? Do you share our vision?