Design & Reuse

Group Describes Specs for x86, ARM SoCs

Rick Merritt, EETimes
8/26/2013 01:00 AM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Engineers got their first public look at work-in-progress on an open specification for programming processors using a variety of different kinds of cores. The Heterogeneous Systems Architecture Foundation (HSA) gave a half-day tutorial at the Hot Chips conference here on a set of specs it aims to release in mid-2014.

The HSA specs initially aim to let graphics cores act as equal citizens on an SoC with host processor cores, sharing features such as a common pool of coherent memory. They will evolve to include other kinds of cores such as DSPs, codecs, DMA engines, and other accelerators in the future.