What does HSA bring to AMD? The New Year of APU

What does

As the global PC industry is relatively depressed today, both Intel and AMD, which are upstream of the industry chain, are looking for a transformation, but the two sides have chosen a completely different path. While sticking to the PC chip, Intel is looking at mobile phone chips in the mobile Internet arena, while AMD is sticking to the chips while focusing on the game consoles, servers and other fields. From the current transition results, AMD's transition is relatively smooth, its share price is a good example, and the current transformation of Intel has not been a surprise bright spot, its smartphone chip has not opened the market temporarily.

At just the end of the APU Global developer Conference, we see that AMD is making some deeper changes, which are both a major innovation for existing businesses and an exploration of new areas. The following is the author of the AMD Global APU Conference some thinking.

1, two innovations for Apu appeared, and it was the biggest innovation after Apu's Advent. In the January 2011, AMD was the first manufacturer to integrate the CPU and GPU, the central processing unit and the single core on a chip, it has a high-performance processor and the latest independent graphics processing performance. Intel also proposes a fusion concept, but simply encapsulates the CPU and the GPU. AMD's innovation is to make the CPU and GPU real fusion, although in this process, the CPU more initiative, the GPU is similar to the slave of the CPU, can only passively accept information.

At this APU conference, AMD launched a fully integrated product, the biggest feature of this new product is the GPU freed up, so that the CPU and GPU to achieve a true equivalence of convergence. With new technology, the GPU can manage its own task queues and is no longer subordinate.

New APU products can be successfully developed and fully benefited from the "heterogeneous queue (hq,heterogeneous Queuing)" Technology. The changes brought about by this technology are also obvious, and that is, the GPU's computing performance has increased 5 times-fold.

2, what will be the APU product based on heterogeneous system architecture (HSA)? The author believes that it also shoulders the dual meaning of defense and offense, the defensive significance lies in the consolidation of AMD in the traditional PC, especially the highly profitable game-class PC status. Its attack is to enhance AMD's influence in the entire scientific and technological community by creating a larger alliance.

At this APU Global Conference, AMD experts demonstrated the new product, and put forward the "most powerful Kaveri APU super-delegates" point of view. AMD executives run a JPEG image decoding application developed by AMD: AMD Decoder. Adam has done the JPEG image decoding speed demonstration respectively in the HSA characteristic shutdown and the open state. The results show that the HSA feature can accelerate the speed of JPEG image decoding by up to 87.3%.

"Star Citizen", "Tomb Raider" and many other large games in this Conference to play. And the degree of fluency compared to the previous product has significantly improved.

In particular, it is necessary to note that the game area is particularly valued by AMD, its involvement in the game area has two, one is based on the game PC products, this part of the crowd can be defined as enthusiasts, can contribute to high profits; the second is the major game consoles, such as Microsoft Xbox, Sony and Nintendo's product chip.

3, talk about the significance of HSA for the development of AMD attack, this from the side to reflect the impact of AMD in the industry, reflecting the AMD in the field of soft power technology.

AMD Global vice President Manju Hegde in the General Assembly mentioned that the HSA framework is not only the development of AMD efforts, its formulation process is also a lot of the industry's top technology companies in the overall cooperation, such as ARM, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung and so on, to build the industry's highest heterogeneous standards.

At this meeting, we can see that AMD set up a lot of special, such as Oracle speech, arm speech store, which was unimaginable before, it means that AMD by building a Super-delegates architecture Alliance, to extend its influence to smart phones, tablets, notebooks, servers, supercomputers and other areas, Despite some areas of AMD have not yet been involved.

Other small details of the 4,apu conference

There are still some details in this conference, although the relationship with Apu new products is not big, but it is very profound. Basically embodies the transformation direction of AMD, namely game chip domain and server domain.

Sony, for example, has a boss who attended the event and made a keynote speech. Sony's supporters will not be just for their PC and AMD's strategic cooperation, in fact, for AMD, more value is Sony's leadership in the game area, and this is the breakthrough point of AMD.

AMD's share price rose sharply in 2013, due to AMD's orders to include Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It is believed that AMD and Sony will take advantage of this APU Congress to carry out a deeper strategic dialogue, based on the game.

Another small detail is arm's large-scale exhibition and keynote speech. In the construction of the Super-delegates Alliance, AMD and Arm is one of the main players, in addition, the cooperation between the two sides also extended to the server area, which is the X86 architecture and ARM architecture in the server domain for the first attempt, but also the breakthrough direction of AMD transformation.

What needs to be mentioned is that when AMD chooses to embrace the ARM architecture, Intel does the server and is holding on to X86.