Samsung Joins The HSA Foundation

Things are looking up for AMD’s “Vision”…

Aug 31, 2012 by

HSA Foundation Logo 63x45 Samsung Joins The HSA FoundationThis morning AMD announced that Samsung has officially joined the HSA Foundation as founding member of the consortium. This is an important event for the future of the HSA Foundation and AMD’s long-term vision of an HSA based ecosystem. With the support of a mammoth company like Samsung, AMD is continuing to legitimize and build support for its vision of the future of computing.

Now some of the more keen observers here may remember when Samsung poached some of AMD’s engineers a few months ago. It would be fair to infer that Samsung’s support of HSA has a lot to do with those ex-AMDers, in addition to the obvious business advantages of jumping on this gravy-train while it’s just starting up.

Does this mean that we’ll see HSA compatible chips coming out from Samsung any time soon? Probably not. I wouldn’t bet on Samsung releasing an HSA compatible chip until after AMD has finished its HSA rollout. This means that we’ll have to wait at least two years, if not four or more to see HSA enabled products from Samsung.

Moving to the other half of this HSA Foundation announcement it appears that six new members have signed on in addition to Samsung, between now and the launch of the HSA Foundation back in June. Those members are Apical, Arteris, MulticoreWare, Sonics, Symbio, and Vivante. Now MulticoreWare was one of the most active non-AMD companies that presented at this year’s AFDS, so it’s rather unsurprising to see them on this list.

But more than that it’s becoming ever clearer how AMD is trying to unify the all of the companies that have something to gain from moving past Intel’s monopoly on market. This is why we’re seeing big ARM based companies like Samsung, TI, Vivante, and of course ARM proper, joining up with the HSA Foundation. It’s still too early to say how this one is going to turn out, but an HSA enabled future almost sounds too good to pass on.S|A

Samsung Joins The HSA Foundation
twitter Samsung Joins The HSA Foundationgoogleplus Samsung Joins The HSA Foundation

Thomas Ryan

Author at SemiAccurate
Thomas Ryan is based in Seattle, Washington. Thomas first began to appreciate the wonders of the semiconductor industry while doing research on his previous favorite hobby, PC gaming. Having co- purchased his first computer at the ripe old age of 11, with $150 and the help of Craigslist he's been buying and building computers ever since.