Seven chip giants have come together to define standards for hetereogeneous compute that combines CPUs and GPUs.
www.eenewseurope.com/, Sept. 20, 2023 –
ARM, Fujitsu, Google, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm Technologies and Samsung are on the steering board of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation being hosted by the Linux Foundation.
"We are entering a new era of computer architectures, and it is highly heterogeneous," said Rod Burns, VP ecosystem at Codeplay in Scotland, bought by Intel in 2022.
"This change brings a big opportunity to define and build a platform that brings performance portability. To achieve this goal we have announced UXL, hosted by the Linux Foundation's Joint Development Foundation," he said.
The aim is to define the specification for core libraries interfaces that implement fundamental operations for things like math and AI and have dependencies industry standards such as C++ and BLAS. The open source projects implement the specification and already have multi-vendor targets, with developers already writing code that is being run on AMD, ARM, Intel and NVIDIA processors from a single code base, and often a single binary.
"The UXL Foundation brings together founding Steering Members from across the industry and we also look forward to welcoming more organizations and individuals to join us on our mission. Together we can build a multi-architecture and multi-vendor programming model for all accelerators based on open source and standards."