AMD Unveils its Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access (hUMA) Technology

[slomo4sho]

Both. It's uniform memory access for heterogeneous architectures. The two aspects are complementary, not mutually exclusive.

I am aware of what it does. I was just commenting on the oxymoronic naming of this technology. They could have done a better job naming it.

 

[mapesdhs]

How ironic, this is in some ways similar to what SGI did with its O2 and VW320/540
workstations, ie. a single pool of memory for all subsystems, though back then they
pushed GE/lighting calculations onto the CPU. Still, for its time, the results were
impressive, with a maxed-out VW320 able to match a GF3, while O2 held the Shake
& Chalice records for several years. Here's an old O2 diagram:

http://sgidepot.co.uk/o2-block-diag-2.gif

and a more detailed version:

http://sgidepot.co.uk/ip32.gif


I hope AMD can pull this off, it should finally give them something to shout
about if the end result shows useful advantages & performance gains just
as SGI did back in the 1990s.

Ian.

PS. For those who post comments and find their text mangled eg. (line
breaks removed), select Tracked Threads from your profile drop-down
menu, click on the thread to which you've just posted, you'll then be on
the .co.uk forums site and can edit your post to reinsert the line breaks,
etc. Just a temporary solution until the site wombles fix all these posting
& forum bugs.

 

[InvalidError]

Sounds a lot like a variant or extension of DirectX's texture streaming where the IGP/GPU can process textures directly from system RAM instead of making a local copy first.

 

[murzar]

If you add an 'N' in the end.. it becomes 'hUMAN'.

 

[Charles Stutts]

loverly

 

[GreaseMonkey_62]

Does this mean we can see some truly stellar AMD based tablets soon?

 

[bowzef]

this sounds good and all, but CPU performance on AMD CPU's need match Intel, as of moment even if HSA+hUMA , it still no chance with Intel SB/IV/HS + discrete top gaming GPU, the brute force of what intel and AMD GPU and NV GPU have out weight what this has to offer, unless AMD CPU/APU can catch intel, and from what i can see use Discrete GPU with HSA+hUMA + the APU, if that is case then this would be future, but it has work with discrete cards as well, they new overhual how Motherboard work and how PCI lanes works as well