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[apfel]

Hi,

i got an AMD A10-7850K and wanted to test and play with

GitHub - HSAFoundation/CLOC: CL Offline Compiler : Compile OpenCL kernels to HSAIL

But i also thought about getting a dedicated GPU to improve

the potential performance. Like an RX480 or RX460. Is this

possible? I mean, does the IOMMUv2 enable the dedicated

GPU to use the system memory as real shared memory, like

the integrated GPU in the APU?

PS: I was not able to find a real document about this IOMMUv2,

maybe i just didn't find it. Also information about how the cache

coherence is realized in the APU between the CPU and GPU

cores is somewhat limited. I only found third party websites with

information on that. Maybe somebody can point me to a good

source.

Thanks!

BR

Simon

[apfel]

OK,

i got an dedicated GPU but so far i had no success using it with HSA.

I guess its not supposed to work because the cache coherence is only garantied

for the APU.

BR

Simon

[glupescu]

The role of the IOMMU IP block is to act as a MMU for the PCI devices. In other words it lies between the PCIe device (in your case GPU) and the RC (Root Complex [1] and does the translations as per what tables it has. For example the GPU instructs the DMA engines to write to memory region 0x1000, the request gets sent via the PCIe lanes and the IOMMU block would translate 0x1000 to another address like 0x2E000 000. The GPU thinks it is writing at 0x1000 through the DMA - the GPU only writes btw using the DMA to RAM (CPU/system memory) and using its memory controller to VRAM (its memory).

Coherency would be a big problem given the memory systems are different - and even if that would be solved, it would provide no real performance benefits that I can think of (given the PCIe transfers need to take place anyway).

[1] Root complex - Wikipedia