AMD Talks Up HSA Architecture On Linux ARM

Greg Stoner of AMD and representing the HSA Foundation talked last week at the Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event about the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as it concerns ARM.

The HSA focus continues to be about bringing accelerators forward as first-class processors, attracting mainstream programmers, and creating a focus around APU/SoC/GPU/CPU support. AMD remains committed through the HSA for being open-source friendly with their Linux execution and compilation stack to be open-source, allowing for a single shared implementation, and encouraging research in all areas of HSA.

Right now the tools available include the libHSA assembler and disassembler, the HSAIL instruction set simulator, and the HSA ISS loader library for Java/C++ and for dispatching HSAIL kernels. This code is available via the HSAFoundation on GitHub. Soon they are supposed to be releasing an LLVM back-end for supporting HSAIL and BRIG outputs as well as a C++AMP Clang compiler front-end.

More details on the active open-source HSA work can be found via the PDF slides and the embedded session video below.