I have been reading allot lately about Kaveri and how HSA will work. I think it is a really awesome concept and something I hope will do well in the PC market. I hope BEAMNG will sometime get HSA support, maybe after 1-2 years. I do believe it will boost the performance using APU's significally and that the HSA compatible APU's might even compete with the high end i7's. I know you have allot on your list and i'm pretty sure you have been thinking about HSA, especially estama. Thx for reading
I think physics calculations on the GPU is the way to go. I don't know much about HSA, but it works on an APU. No matter how much you optimize an APU, its performance will be far far away from a dedicated GPU.
The thing is about APUs is that they don't have a PCIe bus between the CPU and GPU. This can enable some pretty cool stuff. HSA is all about getting the CPU and GPU to work together nicely, accessing the same memory (all of it), having the same flexibility to dispatch work and so on. Some of this stuff you can't do effectively with a dedicated GPU.
Yes Kaveri's architecture is very interesting, and i look forward into exploring it. Nevertheless, right now, AMD has a big problem with how underpowered their CPU cores are. I hope that AMD will start increasing the IPC of the CPU side, otherwise the GPU side will be starved because the CPU won't be able to keep it well fed.
