AMDs new HSA technology - impact on mining

[virtualmaster]

What impact will have AMDs new HSA technology on mining ?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amds-heterogeneous-uniform-memory-access-coming-this-year-in-kaveri/

[bcpokey]

What impact will have AMDs new HSA technology on mining ?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amds-heterogeneous-uniform-memory-access-coming-this-year-in-kaveri/

From what it looks like, and I'm not software expert, this is simply allowing pooled memory space, which I don't believe would have any impact on mining. Maybe it'll make scrypt a little easier to handle? Not sure, since you're still not hitting the CPU very much when your GPU is hashing away.

[-ck]

What impact will have AMDs new HSA technology on mining ?

In the age of ASICs, likely none. Scrypt mining, on the other hand...

[zvs]

it should have had 'bitcoin miners' in that roundtable of potential market =/

[wildbud]

What impact will have AMDs new HSA technology on mining ?

In the age of ASICs, likely none. Scrypt mining, on the other hand...

And since scrypt mining will soon be the only thing that GPUs are good for ....

[computerparts]

What impact will have AMDs new HSA technology on mining ?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amds-heterogeneous-uniform-memory-access-coming-this-year-in-kaveri/

ZERO. HSA is not designed for mining.

[2112]

For speed: either none or negative

The hUMA targets the common bottleneck of copying buffers from the CPU memory to the GPU memory. When mining scrypt() (or anything else) GPU first writes to the buffer then reads from it, there is no bulk copying.

Most likely use will be the cost and power savings for the low-end systems. So the positive thing will be that the whole system will not need to have dedicated VRAM chips near the GPU and therefore it may be cheaper. Those cost saving will be offset by the increased contention for DRAM, therefore the mining systems will have to be throughly purged from any stray tasks that use the CPU.

By the way: SGI used UMA with their low-end MIPS systems (O2) about a decade ago. AMD seems to learned the lesson and from the start intends to provide better UMA software support for the regular graphics programming than SGI did with OpenGL.

[cryptosize]

Just wondering... has anyone made a cryptocurrency that favors APUs by utilizing HSA/hUMA?

Traditional discrete CPU/GPU rigs have PCIe latency which hinders certain GPGPU algorithms (where the CPU/GPU need to work concurrently on the same data set with zero delay).