[Beowulf] El Reg: AMD reveals potent parallel processing breakthrough

[Christopher Samuel]

This sounds interesting..

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/01/amd_huma/

# AMD has released details on its implementation of The Next
# Big Thing in processor evolution, and in the process has
# unleashed the TNBT of acronyms: the AMD APU (CPU+GPU) HSA hUMA.
[...]
# The secret sauce that Kaveri will bring to the computing party
# is hUMA, a scheme in which both CPU and GPU can share the same
# memory stash and the data within it, saving all those nasty
# copying cycles. hUMA is cache-coherent, as well – both CPU and
# GPU have identical pictures of what's what in both physical
# memory and cache, so if the CPU changes something, the GPU
# knows it's been changed.
#
# Importantly, hUMA's shared memory pool extends to virtual
# memory, as well, which resides far away – relatively
# speaking – on a system's hard drive or SSD. The GPU does
# need to ask the CPU to tell the system's operating system
# to fetch the required data from virtual memory, but at least
# it can get what it wants, when it wants.

-- 
  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
  VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
  http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci