Computer Hope
Microsoft => Microsoft Windows => Windows 10 and 11 => Topic started by: geckoomlet on July 05, 2015, 06:16:55 PM
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Hi
I was wondering about what will you get by using the new AMD Carrizo APUs with full HSA 1.0 support, with a Windows 10 OS?
Also, is there any list of games/software that make use of HSA?
Seems strange to me that this info is very very scarce, you would think that if indeed there is an advantage, MS, AMD or others will talk about it. And I know that there is an advantage as there are few benchmarks over the web
Thanks
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It is too early to see if it will be well received by the market.
About two week ago:
AMD Launches Carrizo
Previously when we have mentioned Carrizo, such as when AMD opened the lid on a few important aspects earlier this year, all thoughts pointed towards the new core under the hood, Excavator, and if there would be any desktop presence to speak of. As we recently discussed in the latest desktop APU release from AMD, Excavator is purely a laptop play, and today’s release of Carrizo explains a lot about why that is ...
The article almost sounds like n apology. The author wenton to lament:
It also means it comes across as quite difficult to produce a single product that scales across that large range, and we end up with extremely focused product launches like Carrizo ...
An the name? Carrizo? Sounds like something to eat.
Read More... (http://www.anandtech.com/show/9319/amd-launches-carrizo-the-laptop-leap-of-efficiency-and-architecture-updates)
So expect maybe new laptops coming soon. The above story names four top makers to bring the new AMD to the market.
But when? Who knows? :)
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"Heterogeneous Systems Architecture" is pretty much AMD's way of saying "Integrated Graphics" without causing gamers to shrink back in horror.
At any rate, it is advertised as being transparent to software anyway, so I wouldn't expect that you would see any benefits from newer software to "take advantage" of it.
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It is too early to see if it will be well received by the market.
About two week ago:The article almost sounds like n apology. The author wenton to lament:An the name? Carrizo? Sounds like something to eat.
Read More... (http://www.anandtech.com/show/9319/amd-launches-carrizo-the-laptop-leap-of-efficiency-and-architecture-updates)
So expect maybe new laptops coming soon. The above story names four top makers to bring the new AMD to the market.
But when? Who knows? :)
Carrizo sounds to me like some "exotic" island (the word exotic being a bit annoying) and maybe the name of some romantic propeller fighter plane ((-:
Carrizo laptops are already available, at least from HP, btw
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"Heterogeneous Systems Architecture" is pretty much AMD's way of saying "Integrated Graphics" without causing gamers to shrink back in horror.
At any rate, it is advertised as being transparent to software anyway, so I wouldn't expect that you would see any benefits from newer software to "take advantage" of it.
I think you do have to program differently, actually. You have to use, for example, something like OpenCL - not sure if you have to change your OpenCL code, but you do have to use it. Otherwise, your old code will be in use which will do the inefficient process of manually copying the memory and all that
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I think you do have to program differently, actually. You have to use, for example, something like OpenCL - not sure if you have to change your OpenCL code, but you do have to use it. Otherwise, your old code will be in use which will do the inefficient process of manually copying the memory and all that
If it requires custom logic, nobody will take advantage of it. AMD already dumped Mantle pretty much for this very reason. Investing developer time in something which will only benefit a specific subset of people usually requires massive advantages.
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1. It's not a special logic, it's adoption of OpenCL or compatible stuff, over time. Using APIs like OpenCL has its immediate benefits as well as future benefits. I also think it should be close in syntax to C, so it's not like moving from C to .. I don't know, perl.
2. Mantle achieved at least two goals for AMD, as far as I see - marketing and mantling DX12. Marketing, because now people know AMD has this thing and DX12, because they worked with MS and "contributed" their knowledge and way of thinking to Windows 10, which means better adoption for them
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HSA is already in use. LibreOffice Calc uses it and benchmarks show it results in a huge improvements over just OpenCL with no HSA
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In other words ...they have a technology that cannot be optimised without software engineers buying in to it...
Doubt it'll hapen.,,
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1. It's not a special logic, it's adoption of OpenCL or compatible stuff, over time.
It's (effectively) the ability to use OpenCL for running more application-specific logic. Though this is already possible the idea is that the main system memory will be shared between the processor and GPU and therefore OpenCL will have access to the same memory space as applications. This does raise some important considerations about how this will operate within a Virtualized Memory environment and/or whether this is something that can be implemented without low-level Kernel support. OpenCL code written for the purpose of running on HSA won't run on other systems- that means that development of a program for HSA support would need to either not support systems that don't support HSA capabilities or they will need to write it twice. The thing about the "over time" qualifier is that has been said about a lot of new things. For example, VL Bus was going to penetrate the market "over time". The fact about technology is that if nobody supports it or uses it, it dies, regardless of any possible technical benefits. MCA was objectively superior to any of the competing bus designs at the time, but it failed for largely political reasons.
Using APIs like OpenCL has its immediate benefits as well as future benefits.
Generally- right now, that is, OpenCL is for shaders (and scientific processing with GPUs). In the latter case you need to copy the information the OpenCL will use to VRAM. This copying is of course slower than not copying- thing is, though, VRAM is many times faster than System Memory, which is a consideration largely unaddressed by the literature AMD provides. Otherwise, HSA, despite their insistence to the contrary, appears to effectively change how integrated GPUs share system memory, allowing them (in some manner) to use the same memory without 'partitioning' it (in some sense, making them more integrated)
I also think it should be close in syntax to C, so it's not like moving from C to .. I don't know, perl.
OpenCL typically uses a sort standardized C dialect, yes. But outside of low-level software, C tends not to be used for much. C++ tends to be as low as you will find the typical desktop application going. And OpenCL is a different platform and language not only from C but particularly from C++. In order to implement HSA support in a C++ project, existing logic will need to be ported to OpenCL, or new implementations will need to be written against both OpenCL as well as C++. It is a barrier to entry that comes with significant "negative points" in terms of costing, as it would require writing the same thing twice, or dropping support for any system that cannot run their OpenCL implementations (via HSA). Presumably, of course, if it gains enough traction, most developers won't have to worry about it- most JIT's would eventually implement support for it anyway.
2. Mantle achieved at least two goals for AMD, as far as I see - marketing and mantling DX12. Marketing, because now people know AMD has this thing and DX12, because they worked with MS and "contributed" their knowledge and way of thinking to Windows 10, which means better adoption for them
AMD doesn't appear to have worked any more closely with Microsoft than is typical for hardware manufacturers. Not aware of any specific contributions AMD would have made towards Windows 10, either- I mean, beyond the standard fare where Microsoft works with hardware manufacturers in general.
HSA is already in use. LibreOffice Calc uses it and benchmarks show it results in a huge improvements over just OpenCL with no HSA
Alright, fair enough. I was wrong. I was going to make a quip about LibreOffice here, but can't think of anything clever. So pretend I made a clever yet biting comment about LibreOffice.
From what I can gather- (And annoyingly, it's just laymans articles) the performance improvement was after significant refactoring. It seems to suggest the improvements were measured based on performance before the refactoring and performance after. I also downloaded the source for LibreOffice but can only find clew.c that seems to have any reference to OpenCL, which nothing seems to reference, which seems odd. maybe it was a test build?
If they measured improvements, that doesn't necessarily indicate the benefits were due to the changes themselves; their original logic may have been subpar or slower, for example; I presume it may also be comparing via the use of an AMD APU, by enabling or disabling, within the software, new OpenCL/HSA stuff. However, AMD's "Normal" CPU cores have also tended to have rather poor floating point performance (but better Integer performance), so using the GPU core may merely be covering up an existing deficiency in the main CPU core. Realistically, this is very likely what HSA is designed to do- their CPU technologies sort of stagnated (except top-notch virtualization instruct set support), but their GPU's moved forward; so it makes sense to try to take advantage of their GPU talent by having a GPU core try to help out the main CPU core and 'accelerate' it (thus, presumably, the term APU for the whole package).
if I seem somewhat hostile towards HSA, it's because all I can find from AMD is marketing garbage. When you (well not you, obviously, but AMD) write a claim in an infographic that something "will enable the creation of programs that cost less and take less time to develop, and provide more performance while using less power on HSA-enabled hardware." My bs detector goes off, because marketing wizards say that about everything. They said it about waterfall, they said it about agile and scrum. And as it turns out, there is no silver bullet. And HSA is being marketed as a silver bullet. Boom. Instant skeptical blacklist. The same infographic also says that HSA will "move humanity forward"... Talk about losing perspective.
So far, contradicting my "nobody will take advantage of it" claim, (according to the same doc) there are 6 applications that have implemented HSA; (this may be out of date- looks to be about a half-year old, so not sure if there are more) the aforementioned LibreOffice, AIDA64, Corel Aftershot Pro, PCMark, SiSoft Sandra, and AMD Catalyst. 6 Applications is not very many, especially when only 2 of those programs are actual applications (LibreOffice and Aftershot), and the others are benchmark tools.
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4 of the 6 are benchmark/system apps...
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4 of the 6 are benchmark/system apps...
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Issue is even if we believe the marketing guff about it and it is superior to what is done typically,companies won't invest in implementing and using it unless there is an obvious "pot of gold" at the end of it; for Benchmark programs that pot of gold is being able to say "can benchmark HSA" or something similar. But for other programs it would be less clear, particularly since HSA support will be an added cost on top of standard development until magically no CPU that isn't a HSA compatible CPU needs to be supported.
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Man or woman - I can't reply such long posts. Really..
But I'll say that - OpenCL is indeed not that unknown. It is used in Adobe products, for example, and it should be at least as widespread as CUDA in time, as it is more general and an open source stuff. It is not an AMD language.
I totally agree about marketing *censored*, but I also thing that HSA capabilities are far from being that in some cases
I guess we'll have to wait and see
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1. Can't I edit my message??
2. Another thing HSA could be VERY useful for, if I get it correctly, is integrated GPUs. Currently, one of the factors limiting integrated GPUs performance is memory performance and part of it (besides being slower than GDDR5 and the length of the interconnection lines) is the problematic mechanism of using system RAM by the GPU. I think it could have big benefits there.
As a general rule, I think I'm trying to get this picture - try to solve all the big limitations and lets see what we can do with the software.
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There is a time limit for editing Posts...
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But I'll say that - OpenCL is indeed not that unknown. It is used in Adobe products, for example, and it should be at least as widespread as CUDA in time, as it is more general and an open source stuff. It is not an AMD language.
Never meant to imply that openCL was "unknown". OpenCL that will run on HSA and get any benefit from it would need to be specific to HSA and would work differently, and would no longer work as is on non-HSA systems. an HSA capable implementation would be written in OpenCL but then a non-HSA solution would need to be written as well; either in OpenCL or directly in the language being used.
Another thing HSA could be VERY useful for, if I get it correctly, is integrated GPUs. Currently, one of the factors limiting integrated GPUs performance is memory performance and part of it (besides being slower than GDDR5 and the length of the interconnection lines) is the problematic mechanism of using system RAM by the GPU. I think it could have big benefits there.
This is already how AMDs GPUs work- The HSA architecture basically allows the GPU and CPU to share system memory in a better fashion, whereas previously it was more a case of reserving a block of memory for the integrated graphics, now the GPU can allocate and deallocate system memory more dynamically.
This is where the advantage via OpenCL comes in, with HSA there is no "partition" so when you use OpenCL (which runs on the GPU), you will be accessing System Memory directly, which would allow OpenCL to run on the GPU as well as access data in system memory without the calling program copying it to Graphics Memory. However this means that such OpenCL code which expects to be able to access System Memory wouldn't run on systems where it can't. (eg no HSA). It also means that there is still the issue of speed/performance in terms of the system memory, as most dedicated cards have much faster memory than is used as system memory.
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What is HSA?
Here is one source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing
Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor. These are systems that gain performance not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar processors, usually incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks.[1]
Which links to:
Shan, Amar (2006). Heterogeneous Processing: a Strategy for Augmenting Moore's Law. Linux Journal. (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8368)
That was years ago. At the present time it does not seem to be going anywhere soon. Other than the stories kinked to AMD.
HSA Foundation And AMD Hit 1.0 Release Milestone For Efficient Heterogeneous System Architecture
HSA is not only destined to impact high-performance computing (HPC) and desktop platforms — as one would expect — it will also impact mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. HSA will make it easier for programmers to “efficiently apply the hardware resources in today’s complex systems-on-chip (SOCs),” including tapping directly into the GPU.
Read more at http://hothardware.com/news/hsa-foundation-and-amd-hit-10-release-milestone-for-efficient-heterogeneous-system-architecture#1Ta54Fwx2RwDpOgw.99
There is no proof offered to make the argument. We already have systems that employ more that one device with computational ability somewhere under the hood. They are given different names, but in fact they are micro-processors of some form. Just not all on one silicon slice.
HDD Controller.
USB controllers
Keyboard Controller.
Graphics processor.
Wireless Router.
Network Controller.
Any of the above can be merged into one chip, if there was an economic need to do so. Some of the new Intel chips have the graphics on the same die as the quad core CPU array. But they don't call it "HSA".