AMD Releases Beta OpenCL 1.2 Driver For Developers, Announces HSA Runtime For Linux

While HSA is still in its infancy, it holds the promise of unlocking significant compute performance potential that can be applied to many types of workloads. About 47 percent of the Kaveri die is dedicated to GPU resources. Typically, that logic sits unused unless it’s called on for graphics processing tasks. In a perfect world, though, developers could use those transistors to help accelerate general-purpose tasks, yielding a performance boost and improved efficiency. That’s the ultimate purpose of heterogeneous computing, using the right device for a given task, and the potential benefits as they’ve been presented to us are certainly exciting.