Heterogeneous System Architecture

Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is a cross-vendor set of specifications that allow for the integration of central processing units and graphics processors on the same bus, with shared memory and tasks. The HSA is being developed by the HSA Foundation, which includes (among many others) AMD and ARM. The platform's stated aim is to reduce communication latency between CPUs, GPUs and other compute devices, and make these various devices more compatible from a programmer's perspective, relieving the programmer of the task of planning the moving of data between devices' disjoint memories (as must currently be done with OpenCL or CUDA).

CUDA and OpenCL as well as most other fairly advanced programming languages can use HSA to increase their execution performance.Heterogeneous computing is widely used in system-on-chip devices such as tablets, smartphones, other mobile devices, and video game consoles. HSA allows programs to use the graphics processor for floating point calculations without separate memory or scheduling.

The rationale behind HSA is to ease the burden on programmers when offloading calculations to the GPU. Originally driven solely by AMD and called the FSA, the idea was extended to encompass processing units other than GPUs, such as other manufacturers' DSPs, as well.

Modern GPUs are very well suited to perform single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) and single instruction, multiple threads (SIMT), while modern CPUs are still being optimized for branching. etc.

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