The heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation today announced that Qualcomm has joined the organization as a founder member. Since its formation in June, the HSA foundation has more than doubled its membership with new founder, supporter, contributor and associate members that have joined the consortium.

“It is great to see an innovative company like Qualcomm, which has revolutionized the wireless communications market, placing their support behind HSA. With HSA, computing becomes much more power efficient, enabling member companies like Qualcomm, to create unique and compelling experiences for the consumer,” said Phil Rogers, HSA foundation president and AMD corporate fellow.

Qualcomm joins AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments as founder members of the HSA foundation. The companies are working together to drive a single architecture specification, which simplifies the programming model for software developers on modern platforms and devices that have different types of execution units. The HSA foundation will unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in heterogeneous processors. Two more crucial companies, potentially interested in exploring advantages of heterogeneous computing are Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp.

With Qualcomm onboard, heterogeneous multi-core processing standards created by the HSAF will have influence on virtually the whole industry as currently product lineups offered by the HSA foundation members span from lowest-voltage smartphones and embedded applications to tablets and convertibles and from notebooks to desktops and servers.

“Future Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm will contain substantially more computing performance and integrated parallel processing technology in order to meet the high performance, low power needs of our mobile customers. We believe that developers will be able to deliver faster and more innovative applications on future Snapdragon processors if certain aspects of heterogeneous computing are standardized, so we are pleased to join the HSA Foundation to help define open standards,” said Jim Thompson, senior vice president of engineering at Qualcomm.

Tags: Qualcomm, Snapdragon, AMD, Fusion, GPGPU