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Yes, there was this thing called HSA(Heterogeneous System Architecture). Does anyone remember that now?
by sanxiyn 7y ago
Yes, there was this thing called HSA(Heterogeneous System Architecture). Does anyone remember that now?
- consp 7y agoYes, parts of it now present in IOMMU(v2)
- throwaway2048 7y agoZen in many ways is still moving towards that model, The concept of an IO die that all cores hook into, along with all of PCI-E lanes, no need for complicated cross core linking. It would be relatively "easy" to introduce specialized accelerator cores or beefy GPU chips into this mix on a separate chip, and not massively complicate the CPU design, or massively bloat its cost as a specialist die.
- jorvi 7y agoThe PS4 is an example of that. It's an APU with GDDR5 acting as both system and video memory. To be honest for a while I thought that was where everything but servers would be going. You can tune your OS and applications around the slower GDDR5 and it seemed a no brainer: instead of 8GB of system memory topping out and then 4GB of VRAM doing jack shit you could have 12GB that could be dynamically assigned to whatever you wanted! Alas, that dream was never meant to be. Edit: I posted about this a while a back and apparently Arch Linux has a hacky way to use your VRAM as system RAM. Good stuff.