APU was used before they released hUMA (heterogeneous uniform memory
access). APU really just means the CPU and GPU are on the same die. The
idea was always to bring the two together more tightly, but earlier APUs
still partition system memory between CPU and GPU, and when you want to
move data from CPU to GPU, you have to copy it all - which is indeed
fast in an APU.
The thing that hUMA changes (which is in XBox One and PS3 - but I don't
think is in any shipping mobile hardware yet, except AMD's Kabini) is
when you want to change from working on data from CPU to GPU (or back
again) you only need to send a pointer to where the data already exists
in memory - there is no more partition, and no more copy. That's
entirely different, and the biggest impact it will have is that it'll
make life MUCH easier for programmers (at least I hope so).
That is, unless I've misunderstood something (some of the DirectX 11.2
stuff has confused me a bit - but that might just be on the Intel side -
I'm still reading up).
Kevin N.
On 7/20/13 10:01 PM, jude wrote:
I thought that mobile devices were already eliminating this bottleneck
through the use of the APU? Is this the same as what's going on in PS4 and
XBox One? The first search result for APU actually mentions Flash in the
video,http://www.geek.com/chips/what-is-an-apu-1304427/
