AMD is working with ARM, along with a number of other companies, to form a new group that will be dedicated to creating an alternate architecture specification for PC and mobile software programming. This effort will be different than the specifications that are championed currently by AMD's biggest rival Intel. The group is known as the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation and also counts Imagination Technologies, MediaTek and Texas Instruments among its founding members.
The press release that announces the HSA Foundation states:
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.
This kind of standard is different from Intel's ideas on the future of PC processors, which is basically to continue to add more transistors onto a single chip. The HSA Foundation's official website offers more information about this new consortium and their efforts into making this specification into an open standard. Of course, AMD has already been pushing for a combination CPU-GPU with its Fusion line of chips so this would seems to be a natural extension of their efforts in this area.
Source: AMD | Image via HSA Foundation
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