Re:Cortex X2: ARM aims high
by Salgat on Saturday October 28, 2023 @11:16AM
(#38050434)
It's a real shame that AMD didn't embrace HSA for the long term, it's the future of computing. Intel's QuickSync is very popular with certain folks for streaming, and HSA would have taken that a step further.
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Seems this is the approach Apple has taken with the M chips. Everything is unified more or less. Myabe one day in the future the CPU will just be one fpga that recompiles itself for a given usecase and codepaths become hardware paths and then goes back to general for the next task.
There was this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe
My understanding is that later pre-Zen APUs and Zen chips all essentially have the HSA hardware side... it's just that AMD never managed to prepare a long-term coherent software offering like nvidia did with CUDA. So outside of one-offs or very closed platforms like consoles, the HSA capabilities were just... lying there, used as super fast PCI-e alternative to access the GPU.
Now consider that with Phoenix Point APUs you have Zen 4 CPU, memory controllers, IO controller, RDNA3 GPU, and the XDNA "transputer-like" coprocessor, all hanging off common cache coherent transport (Infinity Fabric). All the hardware parts are there.