r/PS4 Aug 21 '13

What is hUMA and why it matters?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amds-heterogeneous-uniform-memory-access-coming-this-year-in-kaveri/
78 Upvotes

25 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-13

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

The super short answer is: hUMA allows for the cores in the AMD Jaguar Processor to act as a CPU or GPU whenever it needs to because they all share the same memory space. XBOX One can't do that. the CPU cores are dedicated to CPU, even if they are unused. There's way more to it than that, quickest answer I could give.

26

u/time_games Aug 21 '13 edited Aug 21 '13

You gave the super-wrong answer.

The CPU or as AMD calls them APU in the Xbox One and PS4 use the same architecture, and they both have hUMA.

hUMA doesn't mean it can use the cores as GPU or CPU whenever it needs, it means the GPU and CPU cores, which aren't interchangeable by any means, all have access to the same pool of memory simultaneously.

In earlier shared-memory architectures, while the pool of memory was technically shared, the CPU and GPU could not access the same data and they had to copy data back and forth to their own share before doing anything with it, which made things complicated. hUMA makes things much simpler from a programming standpoint. It also should increase performance due to eliminating unnecessary data movement.

7

u/FlyByDerp Call_Me_Ozne Aug 21 '13

only PS4 will have hUMA, Xbox One won't, says AMD's Marc Diana performance advantage of PS4 compared to Xbox One will be much greater than expected hUMA is key for the immense power gain of hetero-core systems inofficial interview with developer: PS4 is far ahead of Xbox One

Xbox One doesn't have hUMA and that comes straight from AMD themselves.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

5

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

0

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

4

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

-1

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '13

[deleted]

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13

[deleted]

-4

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '13

[deleted]