AMD’s New Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access

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AMD has taken the wraps off its heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access (hUMA) today. Articles are coming in from around the internet and, as always, we've done our best to round up as many as we can and post links to them here for your convenience. We'll add more reviews throughout the day as we find them.

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"hUMA needs developers to write code specifically to take advantage of its enhancements" Guess now it all depends on how hard AMD will be pushing for this. The technology is promising but if no one develops it, it mine as well be Vaporware.
 
striker444 said:
"hUMA needs developers to write code specifically to take advantage of its enhancements" Guess now it all depends on how hard AMD will be pushing for this. The technology is promising but if no one develops it, mine as well be Vaporware.
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Very true. But as it happens, AMD won all of the next-gen gaming consoles, and supposedly PS4 and XBox720 have hUMA processors in them already. So here's to hoping AMD can use that leverage to get this off the ground.
 
Well it seems like they are in a pretty good position to push that technology at least. Would definitely help them become profitable again.
 
"(As an interesting side note, AMD then added that "people will be able to build APUs with either type of memory [DDR or GDDR] and then share any type of memory between the different processing cores on the APU.")"

Wow can you imagine buying GDDR5 for your CPU/GPU Kaveri.....

VERY interesting.
 
So, this is what AMD planned for Kaveri to introduce HSA to that APU. It's basically, well literally, what the PS4 APU is doing.

Very nice!

I can't wait to see what Excavator will have after Steamroller.
 
Here's what I want to know. Does this mean crossfire systems will have "additive" memory? Like two 3 gig cards now = 6 GB or a "6 gigabyte" dual GPU card will have the full memory of all the card instead of divided up per GPU?
 
Yoda4561 said:
Like two 3 gig cards now = 6 GB or a "6 gigabyte" dual GPU card will have the full memory of all the card instead of divided up per GPU?
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Two 3GB cards now = 3GB effective ... same as the latter dual-GPU case. Unless things have changed when I wasn't looking ...
 
sounds like hUMA will make cross platform games very easy.
what hardware though, socket AM3+ or FM2, or both.. or unified socket?
 
build it & they'll come!

maybe

waiting on the code zombies seems less than ideal - wasn't that the Steamroller plan?
 
xorbe said:
Two 3GB cards now = 3GB effective ... same as the latter dual-GPU case. Unless things have changed when I wasn't looking ...
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That wasn't worded very well. I meant that with this new thing AMD is doing will they finally be able to do 3+3 = 6 instead of 3+3+3+..... = 3
 
cptnjarhead said:
sounds like hUMA will make cross platform games very easy.
what hardware though, socket AM3+ or FM2, or both.. or unified socket?
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Rumour was FM2 with DDR3 and FM3 with DDR5 with FM3 procs being backwards compatible with FM2 motherboards.

This announcement lends credence to that theory.
 
Oh my God, did AMD just make my decision on my next platform a real choice?!

NICE.
 
Very interested to see what comes of this, especially since hUMA will be in full force on PS4/Xbox3.
 
Hoping to do an itx build next year. Hopefully Excavator is out with some decent itx boards, and i would like to see how GCN2.0 fares against Maxwell.
 
Yoda4561 said:
Here's what I want to know. Does this mean crossfire systems will have "additive" memory? Like two 3 gig cards now = 6 GB or a "6 gigabyte" dual GPU card will have the full memory of all the card instead of divided up per GPU?
Click to expand...

But it seems it will be supported on Kaveri only so it is hardware based. Also doesn't get around the 32 Bit limitations so programmers still have to go 64 Bit.

cptnjarhead said:
sounds like hUMA will make cross platform games very easy.
what hardware though, socket AM3+ or FM2, or both.. or unified socket?
Click to expand...

So far Kaveri is the only thing that will support this, maybe with the future in mind (look at DDR4).

GunzofNavarone said:
Yes with hUMA ... 2 cards in crossfire with 3GB on each would have an effective total GDDR5 of 6GB.
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You do know right how crossfire works. The idea is that each GPU does calculate frame (interlaced or not) and then it is send back out to the card that displays it. The reason for the memory being so large is because everything gets stored there. The datacable in between allows the GPU to chit chat and send some data.

For cards to be effective it has to have a local copy anyway, going through the PCi-E bus again to allow acces would be to slow.

So for crossfire it wouldn't matter that much, maybe in some circumstances the direct ability to address some parts of the GPU memory could work out but not as a whole unified single memory pool for separate videocards.
 
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Adelante said:
Oh my God, did AMD just make my decision on my next platform a real choice?! NICE.
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This is interesting only if you intend to use the integrated GPU. This is not going to be particularly useful if you use a dedicated GPU (or two, three or four of them).

It remains to be seen how GDDR latency may end up affecting CPU performance.
 
wonderfield said:
This is interesting only if you intend to use the integrated GPU. This is not going to be particularly useful if you use a dedicated GPU (or two, three or four of them).

It remains to be seen how GDDR latency may end up affecting CPU performance.
Click to expand...

Yup, you may get crazy levels of bandwidth...but GDDR memory has crazy high latency compared to DDR3.
 
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