Since its introduction to the public in June 2011 at the AMD Fusion11 Developer Summit, the AMD Fusion System Architecture (FSA) has received widespread support and interest from our business partners and technology industry leaders. FSA was the blueprint for AMD’s overarching design for utilizing CPU and GPU processor cores as a unified processing engine, which we are making into an open platform standard. This architecture enables many benefits, including high application performance and low power consumption.

Our software partners are already taking advantage of the power and performance advantage of APU and GPU acceleration, with more than 200 accelerated applications shipped to date. The combination of industry standards like OpenCL and C++ AMP, alongside FSA, is ushering in the era of heterogeneous computing.

Together with these software partners, we have built a heterogeneous compute ecosystem that is built on industry standards. As such, we believe it’s only fitting that the name of this evolving architecture and platform be representative of the entire, technical community that is leading the way in this very important area of technology and programing development.

FSA will now be known as Heterogeneous Systems Architecture or HSA. The HSA platform will continue to be rooted in industry standards and will include some of the best innovations that the technology community has to offer.

Manju Hegde and I will be hosting a breakout session on HSA at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day on February 2^nd 2012, which will be webcast live here.  More information on the latest advances in HSA design will be released at a future date.

Also, if you haven’t already made plans to attend the AMD Fusion12 Developer Summit in June 2012 in Bellevue, Washington, I encourage you to save the date. Leaders from the technology and programming development communities will converge at the summit to discuss Heterogeneous Computing and the next-generation user experiences that are enabled by this platform.

Phil Rogers is a corporate fellow at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.