This specification also specifies an object format for HSAIL called BRIG. While it is not recommended for general programmers, it is possible to hand code in HSAIL, and some high-performance libraries may be optimized in this way. The majority of HSAIL will be generated by the code generators of open source compilers, such as LLVM and gcc. This specification documents the HSA virtual machine and the HSA Intermediate Language. 2.3.3 HSA Programmer's Reference Manual-a.k.a. By design, the HSA Runtime is not called at all during parallel processing, and therefore should not appear in profiler traces, if used as intended. Instead, the runtime enables the application to set up its own user-mode queues, to which it can dispatch work at will, with low latency. One of the aspects of the HSA Runtime that distinguishes it from all previous compute runtimes is that there is not a required API for job dispatch. The runtime includes APIs for initialization and shutdown, system and agent information, memory management, signals and synchronization, architected dispatch, and error handling. This specification documents a thin runtime library, to which HSA applications link to use the platform.

This specification documents the hardware requirements for HSA, including shared virtual memory, coherency domains, signaling and synchronization, atomic memory operations, system time stamping, user-mode queuing, AQL, agent scheduling, context switching, exception handling, debug infrastructure, and topology discovery. There are three specifications: 2.3.1 HSA Platform System Architecture Specification

The specifications that completely define the HSA are located here:

Parts of a document