Consortium makes headway with heterogeneous computing

Founded in 2012, the HSA Foundation is a non-profit industry consortium that aims to develop a novel power-efficient architecture that advances and promotes heterogeneous systems, and to help bring HSA-enabled platform and software solutions to market. Members of the foundation create products in the areas of mobile, embedded, PCs, game consoles, high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud server, thereby demonstrating the breadth of markets that can benefit from HSA.

Having arrived in the era of SoC design, today's engineers have enjoyed clear advantages in utilising heterogeneous systems compared with prior platforms. Combined CPU and GPU designs, dedicated hardware accelerators and high bandwidth memory access all provide opportunities for application developers, but we need hardware changes that, in turn, lead to an easier programming model for applications to take full advantage of all the available processing resources. There is still significant headroom in heterogeneous computing to drive more performance and reduce power.

What is the HSA Foundation?

Solving the problems mentioned above is the primary objective of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation. Through industry standardisation and broad industry support for heterogeneous computing, the HSA Foundation empowers a full value chain of intellectual property creators, semiconductor companies, operating system companies, and middleware and independent software developers.

HSA Foundation members design or ship the vast majority of the world's power-efficient computing devices, and include AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, LG, MediaTek, Qualcomm and Samsung on its board of directors. In total, 43 companies and 16 universities comprise an open foundation with broad support for the next generation in computing innovation.

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