Tensilica, Inc. today announced that it has joined the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation, a not-for-profit consortium dedicated to developing architecture specifications that will unlock the performance and power efficiency of parallel computing engines found in many modern devices. Tensilica will contribute its years of experience assisting customers in bringing heterogeneous multicore SoC (system-on-chip) designs to market to the development and promotion of standards for parallel computing.

"Tensilica is a long-established leader in multicore technology, delivering unique solutions that enable both control plane and compute-intensive dataplane functions," stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica's vice president of product marketing and business development. "Tensilica customers today use multiple Tensilica processors for diverse functions such as audio offload, wireless baseband, image processing and general purpose control. We welcome the efforts and ambitions of the HSA to bring standards to the market that will greatly facilitate innovation in embedded applications."

The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation today announced that LG Electronics has joined as a member. LG's diverse product portfolio and industry experience are valuable additions in helping HSA and its members reach common goals, ultimately benefiting consumers. With LG Electronics on board, new possibilities emerge as the fusion of HSA and LG's current IP bring a whole new level of interactivity for consumers- from home appliances to entertainment systems, the HSA foundation acquires greater depth in the smartphone, tablets, TV, digital cameras, game consoles and even the E-reader space. This allows for an entire ecosystem of electronics that touch the lives of consumers throughout their day to be enhanced via a common Heterogeneous Systems Architecture.

The HSA Foundation continues working toward developing a single architecture specification that will unlock the performance and power efficiency of parallel computing engines found in many modern devices. These specifications also open up a more simplified approach to software development in heterogeneous environments which will enable a broad range of programmers to drive richer user experiences into their applications.

Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP), a leading provider of 2D/3D graphics Intellectual Property (IP) cores, today announced it has become a new member and contributor to the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation. HSA aims to push standards based architecture and interfaces for common computing use cases between CPU and GPU, enabling more effective hardware accelerated performance and power consumption on next generation compute platforms.

By supporting the HSA Foundation initiative, DMP wants to accelerate and simplify application development for mobile GPGPU platforms. The benefits of heterogeneous architectures and computing will allow smooth user experience for computer vision, image processing and graphics intensive applications on small consumer devices.

The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation today announced that Qualcomm Incorporated has joined as a Founder Member. Qualcomm's commitment reinforces HSA as the next technological underpinning in computing for a broad range of platforms and devices. Since its formation in June, the HSA Foundation has more than doubled its membership with new Founder, Supporter, Contributor and Associate members that have joined the consortium.

Qualcomm joins AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., Samsung Electronics Ltd. and Texas Instruments as founder members of the HSA Foundation. The companies are working together to drive a single architecture specification, which simplifies the programming model for software developers on modern platforms and devices. The HSA Foundation will unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in heterogeneous processors.

During the JavaOne 2012 Strategy Keynote, AMD announced its participation in OpenJDK Project "Sumatra" in collaboration with Oracle and other members of the OpenJDK community to help bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments.

The OpenJDK Project "Sumatra" will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to allow applications to take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).

AMD today announced an investment in CiiNOW, a provider of cloud gaming technology that enables game publishers, retailers and carriers to tap into the growing video game market expected to reach $81 billion by 2016. AMD, through AMD Ventures, has invested in this innovative software company serving a large and growing market that can create better end-user experiences by taking advantage of AMD technologies. With the investment and strategic collaboration facilitated by AMD Ventures, AMD and CiiNOW will work jointly to enable the best online gaming experience possible through a vibrant worldwide developer ecosystem and differentiated hardware.

The cloud gaming industry, which was once thought of as technologically impossible, is now disrupting the gaming market for both consumers and game publishers as more and more casual and hardcore gamers are making the jump to playing games online. CiiNOW addresses this trend with the first cloud gaming solution powered by AMD Radeon graphics that offers a cost-effective, end-to-end solution that includes the full suite of required hardware and software components. CiiNOW delivers a high-speed, low latency streaming solution with up to eight HD streams per server blade, and up to 272 HD streams per server rack for HD-quality game streaming instantly from the cloud, providing ubiquitous game streaming across all subscribers, devices and access technologies.

Today the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation announced six new members. The HSA Foundation is pleased to welcome Apical, Arteris Inc., MulticoreWare Inc., Sonics, Symbio and Vivante Corporation to the membership roster. Each company adds expertise to the HSA ecosystem by assisting with research, development, production, manufacture, use, and the sale of HSA IP and heterogeneous computing software and solutions.

These new members have joined at different levels including: supporter, contributor and associate. Working closely with the founder members of AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments (TI), the new members will contribute to the growing adoption of HSA in heterogeneous computing.

In a keynote address opening the prestigious annual Hot Chips symposium, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster delivered a vision for the coming “Surround Computing Era”, and unveiled new processor architecture details, enabling technologies and design methodologies that will help drive the next era in computing. Surround computing is an extension of pervasive and ambient computing trends and describes an environment where computing technologies are completely natural and seamless parts of daily life.

“Surround computing imagines a world without keyboards or mice, where natural user interfaces based on voice and facial recognition redefine the PC experience, and where the cloud and clients collaborate to synthesize exabytes of image and natural language data. The ultimate goal is devices that deliver intelligent, relevant, contextual insight and value that improves consumers’ everyday life in real time through a variety of futuristic applications. AMD is leading the quest for devices that understand and anticipate users’ needs, are driven by natural user interfaces, and that disappear seamlessly into the background,” said Papermaster during his opening remarks.

Today at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS), global technology leaders came together to announce the formation of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation. The HSA Foundation is a non-profit consortium 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 easier for software developers to deliver innovative applications that can take greater advantage of today’s modern processors.

AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., and Texas Instruments (TI) are the initial founding members of the HSA Foundation. The companies will work together to drive a single architecture specification and simplify the programming model to help software developers take greater advantage of the capabilities found in modern central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), and unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in heterogeneous processors.

AMD today announced continued leadership in driving OpenCL adoption with availability of the AMD APP SDK 2.7, featuring the first conformant implementation of OpenCL 1.2 and comprehensive support for C++. The new SDK expands the OpenCL application ecosystem by providing developers a powerful, cross-platform solution to unlock the performance of AMD GPUs, APUs, and multi-core CPUs with the added C++ wrapper API and AMD's C++ kernel language for greater efficiency, improved productivity and application robustness.

"AMD continues leading the OpenCL movement, as demonstrated with the release of our latest SDK featuring the industry's first fully-conformant OpenCL 1.2 implementation," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Applications and Developer Solutions, AMD. "Our latest development tools empower developers to more easily harness the power of heterogeneous computing to help improve the user experience by making it easy to write applications that can take greater advantage of the compute capabilities of AMD's leading CPUs, GPUs and APUs."

At its annual Financial Analyst Day, AMD (NYSE: AMD) detailed a new “ambidextrous” strategy that builds on the company’s long history of x86 and graphics innovation while embracing other technologies and intellectual property to deliver differentiated products.

AMD is adopting an SoC-centric roadmap designed to speed time-to-market, drive sustained execution, and enable the development of more tailored customer solutions. SoC design methodology is advantageous because it is a modular approach to processor design, leveraging best practice tools and microprocessor design flows with the ability to easily re-use IP and design blocks across a range of products.

Without making much noise ASUS has made available, in Germany at least, a new, Fusion-flavored (or should we say heterogeneous-heavy?) Eee PC, the 10.1-inch R051BX. Available in black (but coming soon in white), this netbook weights 1.17 kg, and has an LED-backlit (1024 x 600) display, an AMD C-50 (dual x86 cores @ 1.0 GHz, Radeon HD 6250 graphics) APU, 1 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, and a 2,200 mAh battery.

The Eee PC R051BX has Windows 7 Starter pre-installed and costs 259 Euro.Source: nDevil

Swiss company Arctic (formerly Arctic Cooling), has used the brand name "Fusion" on its PSU products well before AMD's so-called "Fusion" APU family came to be. Arctic was smart enough to register its trademark, and is now piling up ammo to take AMD to court over alleged trademark infringement. Arctic acquired the brand name "Fusion" from Boot Up International Ltd., and its Fusion trademark is valid in Europe. Still a sizable market for AMD.

The interesting part is, AMD doesn't use "Fusion" as a brand name anywhere, except maybe its company slogan "The future is fusion", where "fusion" is used as a verb (fusion of various computing technologies to give a homogenous computing experience), and the company internally referring to its APU architecture as "Fusion", on the outside though, AMD brands its APUs under its Vision processor family, with no "Fusion" branding anywhere, except the company slogan.

Introduced last summer at the Fusion11 Developer Summit, AMD’s Fusion System Architecture (FSA) has now been renamed to Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA). According to AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers, the new name is (more) 'representative of the entire, technical community that is leading the way in this very important area of technology and programming development.'

Naming change aside, AMD’s solution remains the same and promotes the use of CPU and GPU cores in a unified way, so as to deliver high application performance and low power consumption.