Releases First Silicon Based on its HSA Enabled IP Core and Unveils Machine Learning Open Source Project

BEIJING, Aug. 21, 2016 - General Processor Technologies (GPT), a wholly owned subsidiary of China-based Hua Xia GPT, a leading licensor of processor IP for heterogeneous systems, announced today that its licensable IP technology has been implemented in silicon and is already passing conformance tests for HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture). The company also unveiled a new machine learning deep neural network open source project designed to further proliferate HSA technologies.

The announcement will be highlighted at the HSA Foundation 2016 Global Summit being held in Beijing. HSA is a standardized platform design with wide industry support which unlocks the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in most modern electronic devices. The HSA Summit examines integrated circuit technologies and industry applications and solutions with an emphasis on the "CPU +" era and the future of heterogeneous processing technologies.

IP Cores Designed for HSA
Historically GPT has developed IP specifically for the China market. The company recently announced a range of new IP licensing offerings along with an enhanced geographical licensing program. With the company-wide adoption of HSA standards, GPT now licenses IP worldwide. All GPT processors include HSA support and the company is now offering world-class HSA-enabled processors to its customers.

The HSA enabled IP core which is sampling now in silicon is a first implementation of GPT's 3-in-1 Unity architecture designed for multidimensional signal processing including image and video processing.

"Rather than designing for fixed size vectors, the length is architecturally specified, allowing for forward and backward software compatibility. Combined with a unique, very low-power out-of-order execution pipeline, it allows for multiple threads of control to efficiently execute while the vector unit processes data," said Dr. Mayan Moudgill, CTO of GPT.

"It is exciting to see the new IP core passing PRM HSA conformance tests. Targeting industrial, IoT, ADAS, and embedded systems, the core is optimized for low-power operation and is available for licensing worldwide," said Kerry Li, Chairman of GPT.

ML-HSA Open Source Project
The new Open Source project targets machine learning and deep neural networks (ML-HSA). The project will provide a freely available library in the form of HSAIL – the HSA assembly language – that any compliant HSA platform can finalize and execute. The implementation will be optimized for GPT's previously sponsored open source gccbrig project that provides for compilation (finalization) to any platform supporting gcc.

"Over the last four years the HSA Foundation has developed the hardware and software infrastructure to support heterogeneous systems. The ecosystem for developers is available with open source implementations of compilers, runtimes, and more. The Foundation is also committed to providing applications that enable portability across HSA platforms. I'm excited that GPT is involved in both the HSA developer and applications programming ecosystem," said Dr. John Glossner, HSAF President and GPT CEO.

"Parmance is delighted to continue collaborating with GPT on ML-HSA. Machine learning algorithms are used in many applications and HSA platforms are excellent targets for these algorithms due to the highly parallel execution capability of most agents. Optimizing for low power DSPs and ISPs is of particular interest", said Dr. Pekka Jääskeläinen, CEO of Parmance.

"The HSA Foundation is a strong supporter of Open Source software with tools, runtime, compilers, and open specifications all freely available from the Foundation's website and GitHub accounts. HSA already supports multiple languages such as C++, Python, and OpenCL. With compliant systems now shipping, providing support for important classes of algorithms will enable performance benefits to applications programmers," said Greg Stoner, Executive Director and Chair of the Board of the HSA Foundation.

About GPT
General Processor Technologies (GPT) is the US division of Huaxia General Processor Technologies Inc. GPT designs and licenses embedded HSA-compatible processors for use world-wide. Best known for building multithreaded vector Digital Signal Processors (DSP) for wireless communications, GPT also licenses cores for use in machine vision, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M), consumer electronics, and deep learning. GPT's patent-pending Unity architecture allows customers to optimize cores for a range of applications and easily integrates into heterogeneous systems providing power-efficient computing and software reuse. http://www.GeneralProcessorTech.com

About the HSA Foundation
The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a non-profit consortium of SoC IP vendors, OEMs, Academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs, whose goal is making programming for parallel computing easy and pervasive. HSA members are building a heterogeneous computing ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, which combines scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU, while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance with low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation using CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, while supporting a diverse set of high-level programming languages, and creating the foundation for next-generation, general-purpose computing. http://www.hsafoundation.com

About Parmance
Parmance, based in Tampere, Finland, provides a wide variety of software engineering services – some of these include compiler development, runtime development and performance engineering. The company's specialists have extensive expertise with heterogeneous parallel computing, processor architectures, instruction-set simulators, and compilers. For more information, log on to www.parmance.com.

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