GPGPUs

[luminousone]

On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 22:24:18 UTC, Nick B wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 18:35:28 UTC, luminousone wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 16:27:46 UTC, Russel Winder 
>> wrote:
>>> The era of GPGPUs for Bitcoin mining are now over, they moved 
>>> to ASICs.
>
>>
>> http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/hsa10.pdf
>>
>> This will be available on AMD APUs in December, and will 
>> trickle out to arm and other platforms over time.
>
> What a very interesting concept redesigned from the ground up.
>
> How about this for the future:
>
> D2 > LLVM Compiler  > HSAIC Finaliser > Architected Queueing 
> Language
>
>
> Here is a another usefull link:
>
> http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/what-is-heterogeneous-system-architecture-hsa/
>
> Nick

And its not just AMD, HSA is supported by the HSA Foundation, 
with wide industry support.

http://hsafoundation.com/

It is platform independent, at least in so far as it doesn't need 
x86 to operate, within a few years most ARM devices will support 
HSA.

And HSAIL bytecode sits inside the ELF executable file next to 
the platform's bytecode, so compiling it in does not break any 
platform that does not support HSA.

Memory isn't simply a shared architecture, its fully cache 
coherent, allows the GPU to use the same virtual address space as 
the CPU, On an APU platform you never need to copy data to and 
from GPU memory, simply pass a pointer and your done.

HSAIL bytecode also is expressive enough for c++(including 
virtual functions) to compile directly to it, so no reason D 
can't.

Some additions to D to handle micro threading, wouldn't go amiss 
however.

The HSA finalizer AMD will be provided is supposed to use LLVM(at 
least that is my understanding).

So changes required to support HSA would likely be minimal, most 
of these changes would be friendly to building in support for 
openCL or the like as well for none supported platforms.