Samsung Joins The HSA Foundation

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

This 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

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Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.