AMD Dumps Fusion System Architecture Brand

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices said Thursday that from now on it would call its Fusion system architecture (FSA) as heterogeneous system architecture (HSA). It remains to be seen whether the company will continue to use its Fusion branding in general as realistically speaking fusion of central processing units and graphics processing units creates heterogeneous processing units.

“Together with these software partners, we have built a heterogeneous compute ecosystem that is built on industry standards. As such, we believe it’s only fitting that the name of this evolving architecture and platform be representative of the entire, technical community that is leading the way in this very important area of technology and programming development,” said Phil Rogers, a corporate fellow at AMD.

Since its introduction to the public in June 2011 at the AMD Fusion11 Developer Summit, the AMD Fusion system architecture (FSA) has received widespread support and interest from AMD’s business partners and technology industry leaders. FSA was the blueprint for AMD’s overarching design for utilizing CPU and GPU processor cores as a unified processing engine, which we are making into an open platform standard. This architecture enables many benefits, including high application performance and low power consumption. At present AMD ships two families of its accelerated processing units (APUs) that combine x86 cores and Radeon stream processors in a single chip.

Software makers have already released more than 200 applications that benefit from GPU-based acceleration. In a bid to attract more interest from software developers and emphasize that general-purpose processing on GPUs is an industrial standard, not an AMD standard, AMD will call its system architecture as “heterogeneous”. According to AMD, the HSA platform will continue to be rooted in industry standards and will include some of the best innovations that the technology community has to offer.

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