HSA Foundation welcomes new members

The Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) Foundation has revealed the addition of new members including Fortune 500 technology companies, software innovators, high-tech silicon suppliers and research institutions. Backed by founder members, AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments (TI), HSA Foundation aims to develop open-standard architecture specifications that unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in most modern devices.

As an independent consortium, the HSA Foundation is open to any computing industry professionals with an interest in driving the next era in computing performance and energy efficiency. Members will assist with research, development, production, manufacture, use, and the sale of HSA and heterogeneous computing software.

Kaveri client and Berlin server processors will be the first chips from AMD to use technology from the HSA Foundation, AMD stated. AMD launched the HSA Foundation with partners to define common ways for GPUs and CPUs to share SoC resources such as memory.

The Berlin server processors will ship before July and will provide GPU cores for parallel processing jobs. AMD also announced a suite of software developer kits and tools from third parties for using HSA techniques on its processors.

Another partner, Oracle, is expected to provide an update about how Java will use HSA techniques. By 2015, developers will be able to accelerate parallel projects on GPU cores using Java Lambda expressions and the work of Project Sumatra, co-sponsored by Oracle, AMD added.