I read a really small article in the Maximum PC magazine late last year about Heterogeneous and it got me thinking about this new Architecture, but never thought about it coming this soon. Digging through Fudzilla's site like I do every Saturday and came across two Articles about AMD and ARM plus many more existing on one single die, this new Architecture will set the future and change the way we take advantage of the hardware we use for everyday Computing.
Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation comes to Life
Fudzilla already wrote that AMD is preparing a couple of big announcements during its AMD Fusion Developer Summit, and the non-profit consortium between AMD, ARM, Imagination, MediaTek and Texas Instruments known as the Heteogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, is apparently just a start of big things to come.
In case you missed it, the AMD Fusion Developer Summit is currently being held at Bellevue, WA. According to AMD, The HSA Foundation is a non-profit consortiom established to define and promote an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing that will provide a common hardware specification and broad support ecosystem to make it easer for software developers to deliver innovative applications that can take greater advantage of today's modern processors.
AMD, ARM, Imagination Technlogoies, MediaTek and Texas Instruments are the initial founding members of the HSA Foundation but there has been an indication or two that more companies will surely follow. The main goal of the HSA Foundation is the actual standardizing of the heterogeneous programming model so developers could easily and cost-effectively develop new software that will take advantage of the US $55.5B processor market and take greater advantage of capabilities found in modern CPUs and GPUs, or in AMD's case APUs. The HSA Foundation will surely put some pressure on Intel.
AMD 2013 APUs to include ARM Cortex-A5
Following the announcement of HSA Foundation bringing together AMD and ARM, AMD also announced it will implement ARM's Cortex-A5 processor in its 2013 APUs. Although there have been numerous rumours on what ARM's processor could do inside an APU, it appears that AMD is only aiming at ARM's TrustZone technology for now. If you take a closer look at it, we must say that it was a logical choice since both ARM and Intel have some sort of hardware trusted platform/security technologies, while AMD's APUs were somewhat lacking.
The easiest way for AMD is to licence an exisiting technology and while Intel is not exactly sharing, ARM was apparently more than happy to. TrustZone tech is still ARM's technology and in order to use it, AMD needs to squeeze in ARM's processor inside its APU. According to available details, ARM's Cortex-A5 is the best processor for such application.
Of course, some details are still unknown and some questions are yet to be answered, e.g. how exactly are AMD's x86 and ARM Cortex-A5 going to work together inside an APU. According to available info, AMD is planning on using this combination with its low-power APUs that will be aimed at tablet markets. Of course, we may see some future APUs with something from ARM as well, but that will not happen until 2014. Licencing ARM's TrustZone technology may be just the beginning of sucessful cooperation between AMD and ARM, and we would not be surprised if we see more in near future.
Source: Fudzilla | ARM in AMD 2013 APUs | HAS Foundation