Is Kaveri a HSA-compliant processor?

Question

I have looked at lots of HSA introductions and find that a HSA-compliant GPU should be preemptible and support context switch.

But the Wikipedia article "AMD Accelerated Processing Unit" says GPU compute context switch, GPU graphics preemption will have support in Carizzo APU (2015).

So I wonder whether Kaveri is a HSA-compliant processor?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Kaveri is a 1st generation HSA-compliant APU. As a 1st generation, it is still missing some features of the HSA specification. One of those features is Mid-wave preemption, which means the ability to preempt a graphic/compute work in the middle, context-switch to a different wave (work) and then resume the original wave.

Without this feature, Kaveri needs to finish the wave and only then can it move to a different wave.

Having said that, there is already an infrastructure for running HSA applications on Kaveri in Linux (Ubuntu 13/14). See https://github.com/HSAFoundation/Linux-HSA-Drivers-And-Images-AMD for kernel bits and https://github.com/HSAFoundation/Okra-Interface-to-HSA-Device for userspace bits.

This infrastructure also supports the Aparapi and Sumatra projects on Kaveri - running Java code on the GPU.

Hope this helps.