You may recall a couple of blogs I’ve written which mentioned a group called the HSA Foundation™, something that I have invested a lot of interest in over the past two years. The HSA Foundation is a not-for-profit consortium of SoC IP vendors, OEMs, academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs whose worthwhile goal is to make it easy to program for parallel computing.
The first blog, announced the formation of the HSA Foundation in 2012 with ARM as a founding member; the second announced the first release from the Foundation, its Programmer’s Reference Manual; the third blog – this blog – proudly announces that, within only two years of creation, the HSA Foundation was been named the “Best Processor Technology” by The Linley Group.
The best technology category is slightly different from The Linley Group’s other Analysts’ Choice Awards in that it doesn’t have to relate to either a specific product or a specific quantitative measure. Instead, it represents the technology that they consider will make the greatest impact on the microprocessor industry. And this year they decided that this technology was that of the HSA Foundation.
Being granted this award within so short a time is testimony to the hard work and dedication with which the HSA Foundation is driving towards its goal. It is a much appreciated recognition of the achievements we have made so far in the field of heterogeneous computing and the potential that the HSA Foundation has to make a hugely positive impact in the future. In the words of The Linley Group, “We believe the HSA represents the best opportunity to offer high compute capability at the lowest power while still maintaining ease of programming. Working together, these vendors can build more-efficient SoC processors by enabling the CPU and GPU elements (and other programmable units like DSPs) to work together on parallel workloads such as image processing, computational photography, and speech recognition...we believe the HSA will have the most influence on future microprocessors”
At the end of May 2013, The HSA Foundation released Version 0.95 of its Programmer’s Reference Manual and later versions of that and the System Architecture Reference Manual are coming as well.
My thanks and congratulations go out to ARM’s fellow founders of the HSA Foundation: AMD, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Texas Instruments, all of whom have helped to make this achievement possible.